Print.IT Reseller - issue 63

01732 759725 28 INTERVIEW making huge investments, they are looking to change the model of their business. There’s a lot activity around moving from on-premise to cloud and they’re trying to find a way to do that. It’s not easy in terms of cashflow for a business to move to a monthly recurring revenue billing model that takes time to build. I feel we’re helping people to do that. Distribution has a part to play as well. They’ve started building managed service offerings and vendors that are specialising in that space. It’s relatively early days for us in this channel but I’m sure that we will see some success and distribution will give us wider reach and depth into the UK. It’s become more important to us in different countries, working with a distie as an extension of what we do, but in a local language is of extreme value. PITR: The Barracuda team has also demonstrated its commitment to building up the MSP community through several educational initiatives. Can you provide an example? JH: Initiatives such as Ready, Set, Managed!, an exclusive, interactive educational and networking program for VARs and MSPs to learn best practices for successfully growing their managed services operations, saw 136 per cent growth year over year in the number of channel partners that have requested an invitation to the programme. PITR: Tell me about your future plans. JH: Although we’re seeing a lot of growth and success, I feel like we’re only just scratching the surface. The results that we’re having is allowing the company to invest even more in the MSP business. For example, my team is going from 11 in FY19 to being 19 at the start of FY20. Our reach is getting wider we’ve spread into northern Europe with Managed Workplace. We have a huge number of partners in Germany and Switzerland, we have an APAC team, focusing on going into Australia, there’s a lot for us to do. Our existing customers are learning about what we can do with Managed Workplace. We’ve been a security focused expert in the MSP space, but what we’re now doing is getting into the foundation play of remote managing and monitoring tools, with a security focus, which I feel is a real differentiator between other MSP tools on the market. This is right in the heart of an MSP business, as these are the tools that automate and service their customers that are highly remote, that they can’t afford to send engineers out all the time to manage and monitor them. For us to help them with the core of their business, and then attach the management-level security products they need, right down to endpoints, is the next chapter in what we’re looking to do. The acquisition was relatively recent, but has potentially doubled business, in terms of partners. It’s a huge opportunity for us. Our existing customers that are perhaps using a RMM today or know they need to invest in one, we can show them how they can start to buy that from Barracuda. With Managed Workplace we can offer MSP partners a security-centric RMM solution that incorporates security tasks into a service provider’s daily routine. It complements the security solutions we have introduced via our MSP model, such as email protection, cloud-generation firewalls, and security awareness training. https://barracudamsp.com clusion… Original HP rtridges with gence to enable ges, peak ance and anti-fraud n—technology o HP. ...continued New research from Barracuda Networks highlights the market trends and focus areas for channel partners Barracuda partners feel like email security is their biggest opportunity right now. 90 per cent of channel organisations said they were more concerned about email attacks than five years ago and 89 per cent think the cost of email breaches is rising. 33 per cent of partners questioned felt that email was end-users’ biggest focus in 2018, followed by data protection (23 per cent) and network security (19 per cent). A fifth (20 per cent) identified email security as their own focus for the next 12 months, with network security and data protection coming in next again. Security budgets and managed services on the rise In terms of general trends, security budgets are on the increase. Three quarters of partners think budgets are rising, with 26 per cent saying they are doing so significantly. The channel doesn’t have a lot of confidence in customers’ ability to quickly remediate a cyber-attack. Only 24 per cent were confident that more than half of their customers could do this – just 3 per cent said that all could. Managed services are also on an upward trajectory, with over two-thirds offering managed services (71 per cent) already, and 24 per cent planning on offering this soon, leaving just five per cent with no plans to offer it. Cloud security Partners feel that public cloud will be the largest growth area for their customers over the next year. A massive 88 per cent of channel businesses were concerned about the rapid increase of customer mis-configurations that are causing security exposure, with 40 per cent claiming to be very concerned. 38 per cent of channel organisations said that more than half of their customers have issues around ensuring their cloud environments stay compliant, due to the number of cloud apps/providers they use. Half (51 per cent) said that the majority of their customers do not have complete visibility of the security of all their end points across their entire multi- cloud infrastructure. The results also point to uncertainty around cloud security too, with 16 per cent of respondents feeling that on-premises environments are more secure than cloud. 54 per cent think they offer the same level of security, but only when they are secured properly. www.barracuda.com Email security channel’s biggest focus for 2019