Capitalizing on the urgency companies have to launch new digital businesses, cybersecurity vendors create partnerships to close product gaps quickly. An understanding of how the new alliances can deliver results must be part of every CISO’s purchasing decision process. But partnerships can be something of a slippery slope.
Today, CISOs face the conflicting problem of securing operations while supporting business growth. IT and cybersecurity teams are stretched thin attempting to scale endpoint security for virtual workforces, while securing their customer identities and transactions. CIOs and CISOs are turning to vendors they rely on for immediate help. In turn, cybersecurity vendors’ quick fix is to create as many partnerships as possible to close product gaps and close the upsell or new sale.
What’s driving market demand is the pressure CIOs and CISOs have to deliver results. Companies’ boards of directors are willing to double down on digital business plan investments and accelerate them. According to the 2021 Gartner Board of Directors’ survey, 60% of the boards rely on digital business initiatives to improve operations performance, and 50% want to see technology investments deliver improved cost optimization.
Company boards have a high level of enthusiasm for technology spending in general and cybersecurity especially. As a result, Gartner predicts the combined endpoint security and network access market will be a $111 billion opportunity. For such cybersecurity companies, partnerships are a quick path to lucrative deals and higher profits.
Partnerships alone will not solve the conflicting demands for IT resources to secure a business while driving new business growth. They are not a panacea for the biggest challenges facing IT today. Trusting the wrong partnerships can cost millions of dollars, lose months of productive time, and even cause a new digital venture to fail. Due diligence of nascent cybersecurity partnerships needs to go beyond comparing partners’ financial statements and into the specifics of how multiple technologies are performing in actual, live scenarios today. Ten ways stand out as means to guide decision making.
10 ways to truth-test cybersecurity partnerships
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