Customers are continuing to buy too many security products and the channel is missing an opportunity to guide them through a consolidation process, according to Cisco senior vice-president of global partner sales Oliver Tuszik.
This trend is a surprise as it had been thought that given the “economic headwinds” everyone is complaining about firms would be cutting back on the number of security products that they clearly don’t need.
Tuszik said:“It is still a shocking surprise that most of our customers have a huge amount of different security tools – even small business which have 200 people [are] normally running up to six different tools to manage their security part. When you go into large corporate enterprise business, they normally have more than 50 and up to 100 different tools, and then often from at least 20 different vendors.”
He added that customers are facing difficulties in finding skilled staff to manage those numerous tools, with the security skills shortage continuing to be a headache globally.
“It is a difficult situation right now for all of our customers – they are experiencing one of the biggest challenges when it comes to security,” said Tuszik.
The situation is causing more customers to look to partners to help them ensure they have end-to-end protection with less pressure to stack a portfolio full of point products that don’t talk to each other and require burdensome management.
“What customers are looking for is less about the best security solutions, and more about bringing an end-to-end coverage model that helps them to manage the complexity,” said Tuszik.
