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With the rise in popularity in managed security services, IT Channel Expert sat down with Matthew Thomas, UK & Africa channel manager at Trustwave, to find out what it’s all about…
Your channel partner, Softcat, recently saw its revenue double due to managed security services…
Yes, Softcat has seen its revenues with Trustwave double each year since 2012. The main reason for this has been the development of key relationships between our two parties allowing Trustwave to become a trusted advisor to Softcat’s customers.
The breadth of technologies and services we offer and deployment scenarios (stand alone, hybrid, managed) have allowed Softcat to understand and fulfil their customers’ needs and requirement. We have then been able to build on these successes through continuing the education of Softcat with demonstrable success stories.
What benefits do you offer your channel partners?
Trustwave has created a channel partner program that rewards and fosters growth for our channel partners. The broad suite of solutions allows our partners to benefit by reducing the cost and complexity of the security challenges faced by their end users.
Our partner program is margin rich, incentivising and rewarding our partners across all types of business back to Trustwave. Our aim is to create an enabled channel allowing our partners to take advantage of our training programs, a partner forum allowing us to develop our program with our partners’ support and full engagement with our sales and technical teams to help support the sales cycle.
Ultimately the main benefit of partnering with Trustwave is the ability for our partners to become trusted advisors to their end users. This is achieved through offering our integrated security approach across compliance management, vulnerability management and threat management.
What exactly are managed security services?
In today’s business environment, where criminals are more sophisticated than ever before, there’s more data to protect and new technologies like BYOD are used for work purposes, in-house IT and security teams struggle to manage their security programs alone. Many find they do not have the manpower, expertise or time to install, update and monitor their security controls and therefore, they seek help from third party teams of experts. That’s where managed security services come in.
Trustwave offers businesses the manpower, expertise and threat intelligence in addition to security technologies so that in-house IT and security teams can focus on other revenue-generating projects. For example, if a business wants to install an antimalware gateway to help detect and block malware attacks, under its managed security services, Trustwave can not only install the technology but also continuously monitor and update it based on the latest threat intelligence. Any vulnerability, threat and compliance management security controls can be offered as standalone technologies or as a managed security service.
Why is this area growing at the moment?
Nearly every business customer in the world is struggling with the increasing risk and complexity of the security market. The costs associated with regulatory compliance, breaches and cybercrime are ever increasing. The IT landscape is becoming ever more sophisticated due to business enablers like social media, BYOD, mobile apps, and big data.
The fact is that every enterprise is finding itself at risk because the demands of their IT organisation are outpacing the skills and resources the firms have at their disposal. These underlying dynamics are increasing the enterprise trend toward managed security services.
What challenges does the channel face?
Channel partners need to ensure they are partnering with firms that can offer point product technologies and managed security services. They are looking for a way to differentiate and by being able to offer solutions or multiple deployment scenarios they have this capability.
