Bad actors and the challenge of reinvention
I was struck by a phrase used by Shannon McWilliams, global vice president, ArrowSphere, at Arrow Electronics in a recent report, entitled The Innovation Enablement Guide from the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC).
“Security seems to reinvent itself every year or two as more and larger threats emerge and all those changes are hard for partners to track,” she said. “The XDR space is a great example, with a continual array of new companies, products, services, and features emerging on a regular basis.”
He’s right, of course. But it seems strange to see it described as a process of reinvention. Yes, security can be an absolute nightmare to keep on top of. As the report notes, “as threats against businesses rise, including massive growth in ransomware and phishing attacks, innovative new technologies are needed to keep ahead of cybercrime syndicates and other hackers”. No wonder IDC predicts global security spending will increase from $219 billion this year to nearly $300 billion in 2026.
Given its role, the GTDC is keen to advance the cause of distributors in helping to make things easier for channel partners. “With a lack of talent and ongoing resource limitations, distributors are empowering and educating partners, helping solution providers bring enterprise-level platform capabilities to SMB customers through alliances with various vendors,” the report claims.
Automatic for the people
It’s an argument backed up by Julien Antoine, chief business officer at cybersecurity distributor Infinigate, in the report. He claims distributors “provide the technology building blocks. On the human side of the equation, there is a massive skills gap, which is why we see resellers interested in digitising the SOC (security operations centre) and combining cybersecurity, artificial intellligence, and automation to handle the first-level assessments. That frees valuable resources (people) to do more advanced threat detection or research.”
All true. But. It puts me in mind of the old chicken and egg question and I can’t help but wonder did reinvention come first in security from the good guys or the bad guys? You’d suspect it was the latter and that much of what has occurred in security was the good guys reacting and responding to the new ways the bad guys had found or created to access company networks and data.
At some point, security has moved to become more proactive in seeking to close off avenues of access for cybercriminals and hackers. But that doesn’t mean it has become impregnable. The bad guys are still reinventing old ways to trick us into reacting in ways that will undermine the security measures put in place in our workplaces or on the networks we access.
And it’s hard for us to keep up even though a lot of those ploys and scams are aimed at exploiting the same old weaknesses and vulnerabilities. According to the GTDC report, artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the advances in data and network protection that “are driving a tremendous amount of activity in the channel”.
But again, that does bring us back to the chicken and hen scenario. I can’t help thinking that artificial intelligence and machine learning won’t exclusively belong to the good guys. If that’s the case, security will need to continuously reinvent itself, perhaps at an even faster rate if it becomes a battle between competing AI rather than us mere mortals. It’s probably not too fanciful to think that, even in that scenario, there might still be room for a human channel to play a role.
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