News in the Channel - issue #42

AI SECURITY

as an afterthought and bolt-on. Security solutions now need to be architected to provide the best protection in today’s ever-changing landscape.” Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality, adds that AI is also changing what attackers target. “Rather than simply encrypting production data, increasingly sophisticated attacks are looking to compromise the infrastructure that organisations depend on to recover,” he says. “At the same time, AI workloads are creating vastly larger volumes of valuable enterprise data, making resilient storage architecture a far more strategic security consideration than it has been historically.” Alex Walsh, Keepit RVP Channel, EMEA North, notes that AI compresses the timeline between vulnerability discovery and exploitation. “What previously took attackers days or weeks can increasingly happen in hours, allowing attacks to spread faster and at a much greater scale,” he explains. “Rather than simply making existing threats more sophisticated, AI lowers the cost of launching attacks, creating what Keepit describes as ‘AI vandalism’ – continuous, automated disruption that organisations cannot realistically outpace through human response alone. The challenge is no longer simply preventing compromise but recovering quickly once compromise has occurred.” Keeping a step ahead With the nature of threats growing, it is increasingly important for resellers and MSPs to stay one step ahead of the threats. “Partners need to move beyond product resale and become advisers on cyber resilience architecture,” says Paul. “That means helping customers design immutable storage, support sovereign deployment requirements, build infrastructure capable of supporting AI, and ensure recovery remains possible even during sophisticated attacks. The most successful partners will be

those developing expertise across cyber resilience, AI infrastructure and sovereignty rather than treating them as separate conversations.” Alex says MSPs should help customers reduce operational dependency, not simply adding more security tools. “That means separating production from protection, validating recovery, regularly testing restores, protecting identity alongside productivity applications, and ensuring recovery doesn't rely on the same cloud provider or infrastructure as the systems being protected,” he adds. “Increasingly, customers are asking less about backup features and more about whether they can recover independently when something goes wrong.” Geert Busse, solutions architect director EMEA, Go-To-Market at Westcon-Comstor, notes that the conversation is moving beyond products and towards security outcomes. “Customers already know they can’t fix everything at once,” he says. “The real value comes from helping them understand which weaknesses pose the biggest risk and where action is most urgent. “Partners are also helping customers think beyond patching. Some fixes take time to deploy, some systems can’t be updated immediately and sometimes a patch doesn’t yet exist. That makes compensating controls, segmentation, monitoring and virtual patching increasingly important while remediation is under way.” Scott says MSPs need to focus on four key areas: “Identity-first security (MFA, zero trust, etc), managed detection and response, resilience (data, security, back up, incident response, training etc) and governance. “MSPs should also remember that, due to the nature of their business, they are a target for cybercriminals. They need to make sure they are fully secured themselves. By breaching an MSP, cybercriminals could potentially gain access into multiple customer networks.”

“

MSPs should also remember that, due to the nature of their business, they are a target for cybercriminals. They need to make sure they are fully secured themselves.

”

CONTINUED