'Cyber has to become seamless, unnoticed and taken for granted' - XChange UK day one, part two

Delegates looked a decade into the future of cybersecurity and heard how generate value from generative AI

The second half of XChange UK day one continued to focus on AI and the reality of its revenue generating potential for channel partners.

Guy Golan, CEO of Performanta took the stage as the first keynote, attempting to predict the future of cyber and trends over the next decade.

Golan opened by quizzing the audience on the history of transportation.

Do you know when the first road was paved? Or how many kilometres of road the Romans paved?

Not all XChange UK delegates knew either (the answers were 5,900 years ago and 400,000 kilometres).

The point, Golan says, is that he sees much alignment between the evolution of the transportation and cybersecurity industries.

It took 10,000 years for transportation to get to where it is today versus a rapid 80 years for cybersecurity.

Looking retrospectively on what he has learned in his 25 years in the cyber sector, Golan believes the next decade will play out similarly to the last.

He believes cyber must reinvent itself, outlining how and why to delegates.

"First, digital transformation.

"Why? Because we want to sell more and we want to make sure that we are giving better choices to the people that buy from us."

Second, the growing sophistication of cyber attacks.

"There are more attacks which are more sophisticated than ever before.

"The bad guys are playing a much better game than the defenders because one, we can't attack them back, and two the sheer number of things we need to defend."

A keynote on the future of cyber would be remiss without talking about the impact of AI, which Golan of course thinks will play a crucial role in the future.

"How do we enable AI? What are the ethical questions on AI? There's so much unknown.

"What's going to happen with AI will be tremendous, but we are only at the beginning of the journey.

"My next point is maturity. We are maturing slower than the world is progressing and that means that we have many more backdoors than ever before.

"No matter how we try to manage that, we are far more vulnerable than ever before."

Golan's final point focuses on global governments.

"The reality is that we have to reinvent ourselves. Because if we don't, we will lose."

What makes an organisation powerful are the basics, Golan states, people and data.

"People make things happen. Data brings valuation. If you protect people who protect data, it should be okay. That's never going to change.

"The next steps are patching, running updates, education and hygiene in general.

"These will not change. But what will change?" Golan asks.

"If we look at what happened with the SOC in the last few years, EDR brought so much fidelity and so much intelligence into the ability to run a SOC to the degree that it is not as sophisticated as it should be because of EDR."

Cyber has to become seamless, unnoticed and taken for granted, says Golan.

Arriving at the main event of his talk, Golan lays out what he sees in his crystal ball into a single slide, leading to a sea of mobile phones being raised from the audience to capture his predictions.

Expanding on a few of his future expectations, Golan explains he believes the channel will see a consolidation of giants Microsoft, Google, Cisco etc, with niche suppliers taking the spotlight.

"I believe that six to ten years from now MSPs, which at the moment are not the biggest, are going to become bigger.

"If you have a niche and want to start applying and you're not part of the Microsoft, Google or AWS game, you have a good chance.

"I think it's going to swing back. And I believe the future will be highly commoditized. It will be part of the tech offering as opposed to the service offerings."

Generating value from generative AI

Giving his first-hand experience into the actual financial benefits of generative AI, Cisilion CTO Rob Quickenden joined CRN UK editor Victoria Pavlova on stage to discuss the impact of technologies like ChatGPT and Copilot.

"The first thing to say is it has opened up conversations with every part of an organisation," he says.

"For a long time sellers would ask how they work with different parts of an organisation. What I've found is that Copilot has done that.

"There are more questions, concerns, and asks from the lines of business to IT about what they're doing about ChatGPT or Copilot.

"It has elevated every single reseller, VAR, MSP, which needs customers. If you've ever wanted a reason to go and talk to people outside of IT, this is it.

"How does that impact the market? Massively. It's very difficult to have a conversation without saying the word AI.

"We know the pace is going to be fast. I mean ChatGPT had ten million users in a matter of weeks.

"But I think what we therefore have is a lot more caution going into the market. I think there's going to be a lot more consideration and a lot more thinking about things.

"From a security angle, there is this endless demand of almost closing your eyes and forgetting about it, or shutting it down, turning it off.

"I think the opportunity for us to consult with our customers is absolutely huge. And they're crying out for it.

"Customers want it. But they need to know how to turn it on, how to consume it, and how to get the best out of it."

Quickenden opens up about the difficulties he has experienced in measuring the impact of the groundbreaking tech.

"Firstly, it's quite a hard thing to measure. When Copilot became available you had to buy 300 licences. So any organisation that wanted to try it had to spend about £100,000 which is a considerable amount of money to try [new] tech.

"What I found is most organisations were keen to take it on, even the ones that didn't have 300 users were still keen.

"Then in January, Microsoft annoyed those who committed to buying 300 licences, and announced you can buy one.

Despite some hesitancy and hiccups in early adoption, Quickenden notes that the revenue from generative AI is already stsarting to trickle in.

"But it has generated a really great revenue stream for us. So it's probably not happened at the pace that we thought it would. And it's not happened in the areas that we thought it would happen. But it is absolutely there.

"We've got about 80 customers who are actively engaged in various different stages, whether that's through licencing, procurement or training."

How to differentiate

With more and more partners jumping on the bandwagon and selling Copilot and other forms of genAI, Quickenden enlightens delegates on how they can stand out.

"You've got to sell to the end customer, but you've got the challenge of selling to other channel partners.

"I'm seeing loads of conversations, but no actual product so far. The role the channel has is huge in thinking about servicing their customers.

"Some of the things we are asking our channel partners to do is how do we enable your distie platforms to make it easier for our sales support teams to know what products you've got?

"I think there's a massive opportunity out there to improve that kind of communication and get answers to customers a lot faster."

Success stories

Some of the top success stories Quickenden has seen around Copilot have been "industry-specific."

"Legal, interestingly, I see as probably one of the biggest sectors," he said.

"So we're doing quite a lot of work helping building case management systems. Using existing unstructured data, they've got even things like SharePoint rather than connecting into their case management environments, to help them train new people, upskills people, compare cases, understand whether they've got more of a chances in certain case with a particular lawyer involved, being able to offer services to clients.

"Any organisation that doesn't have a management tool and they use things like SharePoint or Azure Files, there's some good use cases."

Revealing what opportunities are still available, Quickenden says: "Lots of organisations still have data that doesn't sit within their business life environment.

"So there is a massive opportunity, whether you sell migration tools to help get data into SharePoint, for example. Whether you're doing the SharePoint migrations for them.

"We're seeing huge amounts of migrations as well happening from other cloud to Microsoft cloud, mainly because the accessibility options today and Copilot are brilliant.

"The other thing I've seen hugely is the security side of those things as well.

"One of the big fears is if somebody compromises your identity logs onto a privileged account and has access to Copilot then they've got the most powerful search on steroids.

"So we see quite a lot of risk around that, but that's an opportunity to sell products, professional services and managed services on that side."