Security Growth

This week, CRN’s reporting team spoke with numerous solution providers at XChange March 2023 to find out where they’re finding strong traction in the cybersecurity space. Ten solution providers shared the areas within cybersecurity where they’re expecting to see the most significant growth, pointing to threat detection, cloud security, endpoint security and user training.

[Related: Security  Hot Take: Not Every MSP Should Be An  MSSP ]

XChange March 2023, which took place in Orlando, Fla., from Sunday through Tuesday, had a heavy emphasis on cybersecurity with a dozen sessions focused on the topic. The conference was hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

What follows are comments from 10 solution providers on some of the fastest-growing security opportunities they’re seeing in 2023.

Rosana Filingeri

VP , Business Development

Cybersafe Solutions

The area that I see growing the most in 2023 will be real-time detection. Detection is, in every circumstance, what saves businesses. So we’re starting to see a lot of adoption of organizations moving away from products and tools, and moving more into SOC [Security Operations Center] as a service, managed detection and response, endpoint detection and response—really because it gives them that real-time containment. The other thing we’re seeing is a lot of the regulatory bodies and insurance carriers are actually starting to look for these types of things as well because it’s a lot more effective for a business from a cost perspective, from a downtime perspective, to address something in real time rather than after significant damage has happened.

Wayne Hunter 

Founder, CEO

AvTek Solutions

What’s driving the security growth for us is compliance. With a cybersecurity insurance policy, it’s going to say you must have MFA [multifactor authentication] deployed to all users. You’ll see all kinds of growth of different products, but it’s not just because they’re selling those products. It’s because compliance is driving the implementation of those things. And I think you’re going to see continual growth and exploding growth in security, especially in the SMB market. So to me, all the different things in SOC [Security Operations Center], MFA, MDR/XDR [managed/extended detection and response]—all those platforms are going to grow,because compliance is going to drive it.

Erik Mosier

CRO

Five Star Technology Solutions

For us, our clients need more enhanced endpoint security with technologies like CDR, MDR and have someone watching that. Pen-testing and vulnerability scanning [are important as well]. Those seem to be the areas that customers are getting asked to do a better job of when they’re renewing their cybersecurity insurance. We have some of those capabilities, others we are building. We have some good partnerships on the endpoint security side now and have been evaluating additional partners at this event.

Heather Simek

VP

RJ2 Technologies

I think cloud security will grow because so many people are getting rid of their on-prem servers and moving things up to the cloud. I think we as MSPs need to protect our customers. Even though they have their own sets of backups, we have to make sure that we are protecting the connection, protecting the user and protecting their companies so employees aren’t downloading things to personal emails or things like that, where if it was on-prem, maybe it was a little harder to do. I think that we’ve gotten better at those things, but I believe there was a period of time where maybe we weren’t traffic copying as much as we should have been, or could have been, but now it’s: ‘OK, what are the different things we can do? Can we do additional backups so we’re not only relying on the vendor? How can we make something a little more independent?’