Services, SASE, and the Role of Partnerships Beyond the Pandemic

When you pack 10 years of digital transformation into 30 days, as one CFO recently told me, a few things are bound to break. That’s no surprise: Legacy security tactics won’t work when the ways in which employees access data and workloads have fundamentally changed.

We’re all painfully aware that the pandemic has either accelerated or derailed nearly everyone’s plans. Shifting priorities have spurred many companies to embrace ideas that they once strenuously avoided, from working at home to storing IP in a public cloud.

The majority of an organization’s security stack may involve devices which cost significant resources but no longer have visibility into most of the traffic. That traffic is now going direct from someone’s house to a resource in the cloud without passing through a VPN. Traffic is unsecured. Fortunately, this has spurred organizations to fundamentally rethink how they secure their traffic, their users, and their workloads. What are they really protecting? They’re protecting their information.

In some cases, companies already had the right security systems in place. Others chose to bypass protections because they were in crisis mode. But what worked in Phase 1—let’s call that the business continuity phase—will no longer work in Phase 2, the part where we adapt to the new normal. Phase 2, happening now, is where we start to see security architectures rebuilt and where I believe SASE enters mainstream in the enterprise.

What’s driving SASE? SASE is a big overarching concept that combines 30 or so traditional networking and information security disciplines all refactored as microservices in the cloud. SASE plugs together security components that had been more like silos. But it’s not a quick fix; you can’t just deploy the entire thing now. This was a five-to-seven-year roadmap prior to COVID-19.

Yet, the beauty of the SASE model is it works just as well when your employees are back in the office. You eventually want to build a comprehensive, cloud-native security architecture, but the more immediate question is what should you do now and what can wait?

In a period of unprecedented change, customers need a partner, a trusted advisor, someone who can help them navigate through the disruption with a viable long-term strategy.

Managing Through Disruption

A healthy relationship is one that grows and evolves even when market conditions change. Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), has been an important strategic partner since the beginning of our service initiatives. And, looking ahead, we’re stepping up to help both Symantec customers and partners to augment their capabilities, particularly during this period of disruption.

Some of our customers refer to us as “people in the cloud”—that’s our model. It’s a co-managed model where everything stays on the customer’s premises. We build programs and also do technical implementations. And we can scale. I have hundreds of delivery people around the world that know Broadcom technology inside and out.

According to Art Gilliland, SVP and GM of the Symantec Enterprise Division of Broadcom, “Our goal is to provide a positive experience for customers regardless of how they choose to transact with us—and we have enabled all of our partners to sell across and into all segments based on customer preference. Under the new model, customers benefit from reduced channel conflict, access to partners with enhanced technical skills, greater efficiencies around pricing and transacting, and the ability to develop stronger relationships with their partners.”

Broadcom partners who fail to pursue recurring services opportunities are leaving money on the table. Happy customers buy more software—like CASB—if they understand how all of the puzzle pieces fit into a successful security strategy. A partnership with a skilled services provider can help end the chaos that has vexed many organizations since the shutdown began in March. We can’t predict when the crisis will end but we believe companies will remain loyal to partners who helped them navigate the path forward.

The services model is gaining steam, and the opportunity is unprecedented, partly because of competition for skills but also because of increased complexity in the enterprise. By 2022, the global cyber security workforce shortage may reach 1.8 million unfilled positions, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Managed security services help provide both the flexibility and specialized capabilities that enable business customers to succeed in this highly fluid marketplace.

To learn more, contact InteliSecure.