Europe's IT channel needs to address security in the coming months as the continent prepares to take on the demand generated by increases in mobile and cloud services take up.
Market research firm Context surveyed 2000 IT resellers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal for its ChannelWatch report about the trends they're experiencing and the majority said security was a growing concern for customers.
The increased interest is a result of mobile and cloud service sales companies have been actively buying to support their company's digital transformation. As mobility and cloud services increase, so must the protection to prevent the new tools being hacked.
Context noted that customers are seeking more agile and productive ways of operating and running IT departments, yet without the right security tools, they are opening themselves up to attack.
Despite the trend, only 24% of the resellers surveyed said they had sold cloud security products, opening up a huge opportunity for security companies to sell their products into the channel.
"We're seeing the tangible effects of the growing interest in cloud and mobility services that’s been predicted for so long,“ commented CONTEXT co-founder and CEO Jeremy Davies. “As actual cloud implementation grows, security is a huge concern and that is reflected in the demand resellers are experiencing today."
Context's survey revealed other growing trends among resellers are mobility, cloud computing, SaaS and IaaS.
In the cloud sector, the products and services resellers had seen the biggest uplift in were backup (65%) and storage (49%).
