Monday Morning Impact – June 25

Study: US Cybersecurity Workforce in Short Supply

The demand for cybersecurity workers across the United States continues to grow, according to new data from CyberSeek, a DC-based cybersecurity career and workforce resource.

Citing data from the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security, “employers increasingly are concerned about the relevance of cybersecurity-related education programs meeting the needs of their organizations.”

Nationally, there were 301,873 cybersecurity job openings in the private and public sectors during the 12-month period between April 2017 and March 2018. The total employed U.S. cybersecurity workforce during the same period was 768,096.

CyberSeek is a joint development of CompTIA, a technology industry association, and Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm.

“The cybersecurity talent shortage is widespread, impacting all 50 states,” said Matthew Sigelman, CEO at Burning Glass Technologies. “In every state, the employed cybersecurity workforce would have to grow by over 50 percent to align with the market average supply and demand ratio.”

Across all jobs, there were 6.5 employed workers per opening from during the surveyed period. In cybersecurity, there are only 2.5 employed workers per opening. The metro regions with the largest absolute number of cybersecurity job openings are Washington, D.C. (43,200 openings), New York (19,993) and Chicago (11,464).

“We’ve seen dramatic shifts in enterprise technology as organizations adopted a cloud-first mentality, mobile devices became ubiquitous and digital data has grown in relevance,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA. “Yet for all the focus on new and emerging technologies, cybersecurity remains the constant, led by a trained and certified cybersecurity workforce.”

CyberSeek was created through a grant awarded by NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology.

Channel Impact^®
The new study demonstrates a clear opportunity in this segment of the IT industry. It comes on the heels of a new government report that calls for immediate and sustained improvements in the country’s cybersecurity workforce.

Centrify Extends Zero Trust Security Ecosystem with New Partner Program

Centrify has announced the launch of a new partner program marketed as the Centrify Zero Trust Security Network. The new program is designed to unify its community of technology partners, making it possible for new and existing customers to more easily integrate complementary technologies with their Santa Clara-based company’s solutions.

The program, previously known as the Centrify Alliance Partner Program (CAPP), establishes an ecosystem of ISVs whose solutions are commonly used in conjunction with each other. The network spans product categories including Analytics, Big Data, Collaboration, Communications, Cloud, CRM, Customer Service, Education, ERP, Finance, HR, IT Workflows, Productivity, and Security, including CASB, Identity Governance, Next-Gen Firewalls and SIEM.

“As identity and passwords are the primary point of attack for data breaches, organizations need to rethink their approach to security and move to an identity-centric approach based on a Zero Trust model,” said Ben Rice, Vice President, Business Development at Centrify. “Combined with Centrify Next-Gen Access, these solutions enable our joint customers to strengthen security by implementing an ‘always verify’ approach for everything ― including users, endpoints, networks, servers, and applications.”

Program features and benefits include referral rewards, extensive pre-sales and field training, joint webinars and events, key account targeting, joint sales and marketing campaigns, user events, joint client roadshows, and joint marketing communications.

Current key partners include Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, HashiCorp, SailPoint Technologies, McAfee, Cylance, Exabeam, Bitglass, Netskope, and Carbon Black.

Channel Impact^®
SaaS and IaaS present a variety of security challenges for enterprises. Programs that help multiple companies to more easily combine their security value propositions can go a long way towards making customers safer and, by extension, build greater channel success.

Azuqua Launches Partner Program for SaaS

Azuqua, a Seattle-based cloud-based business automation vendor, has rolled out a new partner program to support the development of app integration capabilities for SaaS companies.

“For SaaS vendors, owning the integrated customer experience is a business imperative, but this process can be costly and complex and typically comes down to difficult build vs. buy decisions for businesses,” said CEO Todd Owens. “Our new partner program eliminates these barriers and introduces a new consideration into the buy vs. build paradigm, allowing SaaS vendors to better focus their resources, scale integration quickly, accelerate their sales cycles, and expand a solution portfolio across applications.”

Participating SaaS vendors and their services partners can leverage the Azuqua platform to streamline integration, orchestration, and automation of key business applications and workflows. Partners can design, build and deploy tailored integration solutions for their customers and connect to hundreds of enterprise applications without VM management, log monitoring, hands-on error handling, and API update management. Partners also retain ownership of contracting, billing and invoicing.

The go-to-market strategy includes a referral program for partners that do not want to manage integration solutions on behalf of their customers. As an added incentive to early partners, the company will offer referral incentives at 20 percent of Year One subscription revenue.

The company claims current partnerships with Adobe, Allocadia, Widen, Workfront, and Zendesk. The customer list includes Airbnb, HubSpot, Procter & Gamble, and Workfront.

Channel Impact^®
The program marks the company’s attempts to drive a growing marketplace.