SASE-Delivered Cyber-Security for Resellers
Versa Networks
January 15, 2021
As a reseller you have the broadest visibility of what is truly happening out there: across multiple industries; different size customers; companies of different profiles. Your expert reputation is well established and you deploy robust solutions with confidence. Yet many in your shoes have been hesitant to offer security in their portfolios—historically much-too-complex.
Look for 2021 to change this. In 2021 resellers with solid integrated, converged networking and security portfolios will pull away from the pack. RFP/RFIs increasingly mandate a blend of networking, applications, user enablement, and security to bid successfully.
Let’s take a moment to mull over how to prepare for the 2021 reseller landscape.
Converged Networking and Security Reseller Offerings
You want to solve the customer’s problem. And you want to do it right; meaning not by adding complex, haphazard, ill-fitting security fragments onto your core portfolio. It must work properly—your customers invest trust your expertise. This is a nightmare if you have to bolt 5 vendors’ disparate point products and management systems onto your portfolio. It may never work predictably.
The Versa ground-up converged solution makes all this complexity incredibly easy. Versa embedded a full suite of all the services businesses must have—including security with SASE—into one single-software-stack package, managed by one single interface, Versa Concerto. Versa resellers are very comfortable adopting and deploying security.
Good Partner Programs
It’s much more than technology. Look for a program that’s crystal-clear in stipulating the expectations and deliverables of both vendor and reseller. Each side’s responsibilities must be precise and implemented with integrity—across the spectrum of marketing, technology, and implementation. Training is paramount. A vendor must provide training if a reseller is to be successful, including all aspects of reseller preparation to optimize time to revenue, time to success, and time to profit. Muddling through figuring things out on your own is not a recipe for success.
Versa prides itself on welcoming resellers into the corporate family with equal access to product, marketing, sales, and engineering information. It’s not just the technology, it’s also about differentiation with the Versa solution in your reseller area.
Major Opportunities in 2021
There is phenomenal revenue opportunity in security—it’s every customer’s pain point. Businesses are starving for expertise to combat the vastly increased attack surface of their networks. The 2020-covid-era mushroomed a once-gradual trend into a now-established work-from-anywhere-(WFA)-over-the-internet workforce. Resellers are in an excellent position to provide trusted consulting to help customers secure their assets. Three-to-five years from now, there will be no networking without embedded security.
Expect the pandemic’s swing to WFA to persist. WFA is the business experiment of the century. Employees and locations are fluid; network perimeters elongate along every internet touch-point. Over time we’ll see equalization of geographic salary differentials, easier geography-neutral recruiting, and a permanently dispersed workforce. Corporate buildings, power, and space allocation may all be managed very differently from yesterday. Resellers with a solid WFA and SASE package can take advantage of this shift.
Cyber-threat landscape. WFA—enabled by ubiquitous internet access—has massively enlarged the enterprise’s attack surface. Security threat seeds planted in 2020 will manifest themselves in 2021. Resellers helping customers immediately to prepare for this threat will grow in 2021.
Cloud will become the norm in 2021 with an immense shift from data centers and private applications to cloud-native resources. Resellers prepared to enable and simplify a multi-cloud architecture will prosper.
5G was mostly marketing in 2020, but the 2nd half of 2021 may well be the watershed where 5G becomes accessible: pervasive 5G on user devices as well as networking devices; built-in 5G in branch– and home–devices. Everything connects to the network immediately upon power-up.
IoT: A real jump in 2020. IoT has become pervasive in businesses like manufacturing, with large-scale adoption also in the home and consumer areas. 2021 will see accelerated adoption in the enterprise and commercial areas. Resellers must be savvy about IoT and immediately start conversations about integration and security with customers.
