Research from Arcserve has found a shift in IT buying behaviour and the resulting evolution of UK channel providers to keep up with on-demand environment and prolific threat landscape.
Cloud transformation and cyberattacks have become commonly discussed topics within the IT community as more business leaders push for digital transformation and ransomware soar to epidemic proportions.
According to new survey results of 356 UK channel partners, 43 percent revealed they are striving to keep pace with this new reality by adding offerings that go beyond traditional cloud backup to deliver multi-cloud and cross-cloud backup and disaster recovery. In a move to address systems and applications that simply cannot go down, half said they are expanding their product offerings to include those that continuously replicate data to prevent unplanned downtime, while 49 percent expect an increase in sales for continuous or high availability solutions in the next 12 months.
The prevalence of cybersecurity threats has resulted in many seeking solutions which provide a multi-tier approach to IT resiliency by incorporating both backup and recovery with more extensive threat prevention technologies. Sixty-six percent of channel partners reported that solutions which combine data security and protection capabilities to detect and recover from ransomware (all-in-one security software, backup and disaster recovery) are important or extremely important to their end-users, even more so than solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to predict disasters or those that automate compliance.
Arcserve EMEA Channel Director Vince Blackall said: “It’s clear the channel has been going through a significant amount of change over the last few years and must now meet a new array of needs. They must not only meet business requirements of data security and protection but do so with a host of different buyers – often within the same organisation. If done correctly, this presents a unique opportunity for channel partners to remain competitive, yet nimble enough to meet the needs of customers large and small.”
IT buying decisions are increasingly being spread horizontally across organisations such that line of business (LOB) executives are more frequently purchasing technology solutions independently from IT teams. To accommodate this shift in behaviour, nearly half of UK channel partners surveyed were adapting their marketing strategies to target these new buyer types, with 52 percent adopting a business outcome-based sales approach whereby the focus is on collaborating with both IT and LOB executives for procurement and implementation.
