False sense of security

1) Awareness isn’t readiness

Training sessions, phishing tests and compliance audits have their place. But awareness on its own doesn’t stop breaches. Too many organisations equate awareness with preparedness, when in fact they are miles apart.

Readiness is about the ability to prevent, detect, respond and recover. It means identity hygiene, rapid detection, tested playbooks and recovery plans. Channel partners must shift conversations away from vanity metrics, such as phishing click rates, towards measurable resilience. Readiness assessments should become the foundation of every customer engagement.

2) Treat identity as a new perimeter

If your customers are open for business, they’re open to attack. That’s the hard reality of the perimeter-less world we work in. Every organisation has soft points, and first on the attacker’s list is identity. Theft of credentials – phishing, multi-factor authentication (MFA) fatigue, and more – remains the top attack vector. 

The better news is that identity is a perimeter that organisations can actively control and is arguably the most reliable control point. Identity and access management (IAM), MFA and privileged access management form an important baseline. Gold standard identity management needs multiple trust boundaries for the user, device, network/session and application. 

There’s no shortage of technologies to enforce those boundaries – and that tells us there is both a challenge and an opportunity. Look at Palo Alto Networks’ recent acquisition of Cyberark to see which way the wind is blowing. Partners can play a vital role helping organisations to strengthen and streamline identity management, providing visibility across vendor silos, offering IAM as a service and managing the consolidation of point solutions onto unified platforms. 

3) Cloud complexity creates risk

Cloud adoption is surging, but research shows misconfigurations and fuzzy lines around shared responsibility are among the top drivers of breaches. SaaS, IaaS and hybrid environments multiply complexity, and security teams often lack visibility.

This is a conversation that vendors and hyperscalers can’t own (not that you’d know that from the rhetoric). Operators secure their cloud. Vendors secure their piece of the puzzle. But multicloud and hybrid environments, by definition, nullify their capacity to manage a customer’s overall risk posture. And that puts the channel in prime position. 

For partners, this may mean an investment in new skills and services beyond design and deployment. As a strategic adviser, you can translate vendor tech into business risk, and map controls to recognised frameworks. That is powerful.

MSPs can go further by orchestrating across multiple clouds and toolsets, not just filling the skills gap. The payoff is incremental revenue, stronger relationships and increased “stickiness”.

4) The edge has moved – SASE points the way

The pandemic shattered the traditional perimeter. With hybrid work, remote devices and distributed applications, network edges now exist everywhere. Secure access service edge (SASE) offers a practical framework for converging identity, networking and policy, at this new, fluid edge.

Like any good map, SASE has more to say about direction than destination. The full scope of SASE is perhaps still being tested in the real world, but each of its milestones – such as ZTNA, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), SD-WAN and so on – are powerful, non-redundant steps along the way. And each step offers partners its own opportunity for advice, deployment and orchestration, and ongoing lifecycle management. 

Think of SASE as a mindset, not a product. The more steps you and your customers take together on the SASE journey, the more strategic your role becomes. 

5) Data security – avoiding the ‘obvious’ trap

At the heart of every incident is data, which seems a bit obvious. Stolen, encrypted, corrupted or exposed, regulators, customers and attackers all care about data above all else. It also seems obvious to treat data security as a last line of defence – and it’s exactly those careless assumptions where risk creeps in. 

In practice, there’s a lot that isn’t obvious about an organisation’s data. In multicloud and hybrid environments, data is often dark, access is complex and data doesn’t sit still. The “obvious trap” is treating data security as a tick-box exercise: encryption – check; DLP – check. Job done. That mindset leaves a honeypot for the silent, patient attacker. 

If your customers don’t know what data they have, can’t see where it goes, and can’t prove they could recover it, then they don’t have effective data security. Partners can shine here by bundling compliance, governance and security into unified offerings. This doesn’t just protect data but ensures it’s intelligently managed, turning data security from a checkbox exercise into a measurable outcome.

Why these truths should matter to channel partners

The status quo is often the biggest competitor. Customers with a false sense of security will feel like as though they have everything covered. By challenging them with these truths, partners can elevate their profile and gain commercial upside through: 

• Differentiation – most partners sell products; fewer deliver measurable resilience.
• Recurring revenue – readiness is ongoing, making it a natural fit for managed services models.
• Risk reduction – customers that are truly ready suffer fewer breaches, which protects partner reputations too.
• Compliance advantage – as regulation tightens, helping customers stay ahead adds tangible value.

Channel partners have an opportunity to make customers aware of the true state of their cyber defences. However, awareness without readiness is a dangerous illusion. Customers need more than tools; they need trusted partners to guide them and achieve true resilience.

So, the choice is clear. Channel partners can either keep selling into a market lulled by a false sense of security, or they can challenge customers to deliver outcomes that last and build relationships that endure. The latter is harder, but it is way more valuable.