Gary Marsden | Cloud Services Director
Disruption affects everyone
The global pandemic is rapidly changing the way we do business. With remote working trends projected to stay for a long time, businesses recognize the need to research, design and quickly implement solutions that will help them not only survive in this shifting environment, but also to thrive. The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption to assist business needs for speed and agility, but business models need to be rethought.
As a result, CISOs face many challenges. The attack surface and the cyber threats have increased, with 63% of businesses expecting to be breached within the next 12 months. They need also to retain control of access to data and protect their assets while the corporate boundaries have blurred, and traditional security controls seem no longer adequate. Finally, they are required to ensure regulatory compliance and auditability to minimize the chance of a data breach and avoid fines and legal ramifications.
Opportunity for business growth
Cloud adoption and the need to address new challenges and risks offer an opportunity for business growth. Cloud expenditure average is up 59% compared to 2018, while cloud security services are expected to grow by 14% in 2020. Finally, 65% of channels are adding managed security services which can generate up to 25% margin.
Despite these initiatives, businesses are still based on hybrid models which not only serve as a steppingstone towards native cloud environments for some, but for many will continue to be the mainstay of the IT environment. Consequently, we need to offer customers the ability to move freely between cloud and on-premise environments with easy to use, click and deploy solutions for complex environments. This hybrid situation offers simple steps for channels to transform their own business by combining on-premise and cloud offers.
6 steps to effectively identify customer needs
The Thales Data Protection on Demand security team has developed an easy to follow, six step process to effectively identify your customers’ needs and provide the right Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) solution. These steps are based on feedback from hundreds of Thales customers globally.
1. Know your data. You must know exactly what your data is, on which platforms and who has access to it.
2. Take control of your data. You must classify and sort data according to importance to identify and adhere to correct security policy. All your critical data must be encrypted and anonymised.
3. Manage access to your data. Ensure that you can effectively manage who, what, where from, and when requests access, no matter where that data is or what access mechanisms may already be available.
4. Secure your data. Data protection priorities and processes should be determined in organisational security policy. Ensure that all your data is correctly protected, and you separate encrypted data and the keys used to protect it. Further, ensure you have control over key lifecycles – particularly key rotation and deletion. If the cloud provider is natively encrypting, make sure you control the keys with secure BYOK.
5. Protect your keys. Ensure you have control of your keys in terms of Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, and Auditability (CIAA) by securing them using an HSM. Auditability is critical.
6. Think of the future. Consider your policies and architectures carefully and your potential need for hybrid models –will everything be in the cloud forever or will you need to pull data back on-premises? In addition, it is advisable not to put all your eggs into a single cloud basket.
How you can increase your revenue
Commercial pressures because of COVID-19 and increased competition from cloud providers are a challenge for channels, who are actively seeking to minimize investments and overheads such as support costs. As a result, channels around the world select vendors that:
- Provide a broad range of end to end solutions to reduce the need for multiple supply routes;
- Provide both cloud and hybrid solutions to help their and their customers transition plans;
- Have complementary technology partnerships to simplify deployments and integrations; and,
- Deliver a strong ROI via proven channel programs and resources.
Thales can help businesses secure their data and enable partners to increase their revenue by following these six steps. Additionally, our unique portfolio of flexible hybrid solutions are easy to use, affordable to purchase, and quick to deploy.
For more information, find out how Thales’s Data Protection on Demand automates processes through scalable solutions and complementary partner integrations.