Lauren Fortune, Global Vendor Manager for Thales at Exclusive Networks
It’s no secret that the pandemic triggered a mass-migration to cloud. As the old certainties of doing business were rewritten in 2020, organisations across the globe reached out for new ways of hosting data and applications that supported remote, more agile working. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global cloud market grew 13.8% from 2019 to 2020. Worth USD 405 billion last year, demand for cloud is set to grow further with a predicted CAGR of 19.9% from now until 2029.
Yet as more and more organisations see cloud as an attractive destination, so do malicious cybercriminals. With today’s broader attack surfaces and intensified threat, 85% of organisations consider security to be their biggest cloud challenge. So, it comes as no surprise that 2022 has seen strong sales in cloud security services, as businesses seek help with moving safely to the cloud and once there, securing their data and maintaining compliance.
As cloud growth continues, demand for managed cloud services is surging too. IDC predicts a five-year compound growth rate of almost 18%, from a baseline of USD 62.8 billion in 2021. This points to a vibrant market for MSPs and MSSPs, especially those offering their customers a pathway to secure digital transformation across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Through our partnership with Thales, we’ve been closely studying the fast-evolving cloud security marketplace and innovating to help our channel partners take full advantage. That means engaging with both traditional sectors and new markets to develop a new breed of on-demand data protection services, known as Thales Data Protection on Demand, or DPoD, that provide access management, encryption, and key management to control data and key vaults to secure those keys.
DPoD delivers the same functionality as a typical encryption solution, but with all the extra benefits of an as-a-service model. With redundancy, resiliency and high availability all in-built as standard, it’s perfect for organisations that operate hybrid cloud and lack the in-house technical expertise to follow the complex set-up and maintenance of on-site hardware. But, aside from relieving the workload of time-poor customer IT teams (made more acute by the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals), DPoD offers our channel partners a long list of benefits too:
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- Affordability. Pay-as-you-go services are the cost-effective alternative to acquiring and maintaining expensive hardware. With DPoD, businesses only pay for encryption functionality as and when they need it. This makes it especially suitable for small-scale deployments across a huge market of SMBs with hybrid cloud security needs.
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- Centralised Management. As well as cutting TCO by eliminating manual on-premise tasks, DPoD increases responsiveness, drives efficiency and boosts customer experience by letting you manage services for all your customers conveniently from a single point.
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- Simple Pricing. DPoD makes financials easier for you and your customers. Instead of charging for hardware purchase, setup, software licences, monitoring tools and other expenses, DPoD allows you to charge a simple all-in-one price and provides a reliable, recurring income stream.
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- Redundancy Built In. There’s no need to configure and manage a cluster of HSMs to support your cryptographic services in case of hardware failure. Instead, redundancy comes as standard, with cloud-based HSM services providing automatic failover to standby devices.
- Speed and Ease. DPoD is easy to set up and works ‘out of the box’ so your customers can be up and running and fully protected in just minutes.
- Enhanced Security. As well as high levels of protection equivalent to those offered by traditional encryption, cloud-based key broker services provide your customers an extra level of security by storing encryption keys and encrypted data in separate environments.
- Readily Scalable. Encryption services can be easily scaled up or down to match changes in your customers’ requirements.
- 24/7 Support. Thales DPoD comes with round-the-clock 99.95% SLA support, giving our partners rapid answers to technical queries and expert support for cloud infrastructure.
DPoD is Thales’ award-winning portfolio of cloud-based security services that include Luna Cloud HSM, and CipherTrust Key Management Services. Starting with a free trial and evaluation, it’s fast and easy to sign up your customers and deploy the most secure encryption services to give them the protection and compliance they need in today’s fast-moving threat landscape. A cloud-agnostic alternative to less flexible public cloud services, Thales DPoD is equally effective within hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructures.
For our partners, Thales DPoD presents a huge opportunity to tap into the rising demand for reliable, cost-effective encryption in the hybrid cloud space inhabited by so many organisations undergoing digital transformation. It offers the potential of higher revenue per contract, easy cross-sell to current customers, enhanced account retention and open access to fresh sources of new business income.
Are you taking advantage of the global rise in cloud-based access and data protection needs?