Westcon-Comstor: Clear cloud opportunities for the channel

The desire to know what the future holds is universal, but already this year there have been insightful findings from customer research shared by channel players keen to know where customers will be investing.

Last year was a challenging one for many in the channel, with customers pausing investments or slowing them down. The hope is that those conditions will ease, with election results now settled on both sides of the Atlantic and inflation heading in the right direction.

The latest to share the results of its questioning of customers, specifically those looking after cyber security at large enterprises, has been shared by Westcon-Comstor.

The distributor found that customers were looking to the channel to guide them through their security investments, which include technologies that provide increased cloud protection.

Funds are being allocated to invest in cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) and other cloud security technologies over the next 12 months.

When the distie aggregated the results from asking CISOs in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the UAE, the main investment areas were AI security posture management (AI-SPM), cloud security posture management (CSPM) and application security posture management (ASPM).

Resellers here were alerted by the distributor for a demand from users for support with software composition analysis. Westcon-Comstor found that the overwhelming number of those customers quizzed (95%) were currently engaged with channel partners, using them to help deploy and manage solutions. 

The channel was also seen as a good source of information about new technology solutions and advice on how to navigate the various cloud security options – with guidance around cloud security especially desired by UK respondents.

Customers are also wrestling with the need to integrate security and compliance testing seamlessly, and trying to unify risk visibility across both the on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

Daniel Hurel, senior vice-president of Westcon EMEA cyber security and next-generation solutions, said that customers had highlighted clear areas for investment and opportunities for the channel.

“CNAPP offers a holistic approach to securing cloud infrastructure, bringing together various security functions and capabilities in a single, unified platform to provide comprehensive security across the entire software development lifecycle, from code to cloud,” he said.

“As the cloud security market continues to evolve, we’re seeing CNAPP become the go-to solution for securing cloud workloads. Our research suggests that this presents an opportunity for the IT channel, with particularly strong demand for training and enablement. Partners who establish themselves in this high-growth area stand to reap the rewards in 2025 and beyond.”

The research has been shared at the same time as Westcon-Comstor announced its intention to establish a new everything-to-cloud (X2C) cyber security go-to-market strategy this year.

As part of that effort, the channel player is looking to drive partner growth across code to cloud, infrastructure to cloud, data to cloud and identity to cloud.

The Westcon-Comstor research follows in the wake of findings recently shared by Softcat and JumpCloud that also indicated areas of customer investment and opportunities for the channel.