6 cyber execs on the most under utilised opportunities for partners

From AI education to DaaS replacements, these are the nuggets of gold partners should take advantage of.

From AI education to DaaS replacement, there are a handful of opportunities for partners in 2025 that cyber executives believe they aren’t taking advantage of.

Speaking at an exclusive cybersecurity roundtable at Xchange Denver 2025, several executives from cybersecurity vendors discussed what opportunities they think partners should be jumping on.

DaaS replacement

Xan Stevenson, head of partner sales and distribution, Meter noted for his company an opportunity for partners is DaaS replacement.

“These carriers are not going to revert the timeline and start supporting these and installing them. It's too let's just say cost prohibitive,” he said.

“Running cellular over the network effectively, we're seeing a lot of our partners look for solutions on this.”

Stevenson said they start their partners on cellular because the larger players aren’t using it as much.

“Your cellular over network is in some cases 10 times better ROI, better, security, cost, and upkeep,” he explained.

Education

For Addie Finch, VP of channels Americas at Cato Networks, she believes there needs to be more education around safely adopting AI.

“If the partner isn't already delivering, or at least preparing to deliver AI assessments, AI workshops, AI education, they're behind,” she said.

Finch noted it’s not just about how a partner helps its customer embrace AI adoption safely, but all that underpinning and drag that comes with it.

“Because the customer likely may need to look at shifting workloads to the cloud, modernising the data centre or are they architecting correctly in their network security tech stack,” she explained.

"It's not just about how do I monetise “AI”, it's all the drag that pulls underneath that to prepare the customer for safe adoption.”

Honest conversations

Mike DePalma, VP of business development at OpenText believes that every MSP should have an honest conversation with themselves to figure out what their customers need.

“It's almost like taking your business right now, looking at it in three years, what do all the small businesses that I work with need to have? What can I realistically provide?,” He said.

“Should I be try to become an MSSP now, or should I go find an established one? What should I outsource to my vendors? And should I build up my own stock?

“But look at it [through] a business lens, and say is this realistically where I need to be in three years, or is there a smarter way to do it?”

Remove legacy architecture

Speaking directly to his WatchGuard partners, Adam Winston, field CTO at Watchguard Technologies said he wants them to upgrade their systems and remove legacy architecture.

"Depending on the product they've kind of fallen in love with. There's a next step to each one of them,” he said.

“If you have a firewall and you're using it as a VPN, please upgrade to zero trust network access. There's just no real reason you should have this legacy architecture that's putting everybody at risk.”

For those running an endpoint, he asks them to add the MDR.

“If you think you can scale to an alert volume when the bad guy shows up, it's just not true, you're just never going to get to those speeds that we talked about,” he said.

For those partners using any identity products, Winston said there's a lot more that goes into identities than just multi factor.

“You should be using security as the premise as to whether you should get access and without muddying the waters to say that zero trust, it's important to say you're using an MFA product, add security profiles to it,” he said.

If you're using the firewall, if you're using the EDR, go to MDR, and you'll be a lot more “ready for the AI attacker when they come to your shores than if you just didn't do those one or two steps.”

Email protection

All MSPs know that phishing is a major risk for their customers and how many breaches begin.

Dave Baggett, CEO at Inky said that they don’t have to live in fear of phishing attacks.

“There are solutions now that have really kept up with solutions that have kept up with the constant evolution of tactics and built in countermeasures,” he said.

Baggett said email security is not something where you can as a private equity investor cut costs, monetise and not invest, because it's a “cat and mouse game”.

“The attackers are constantly innovating, and if you're not, we have, like, dozens, probably 100 models and there's always new ones,” he said.

“We recently added a dedicated module for conversation hijacking, and that's a rare but very large blast radius event. There are vendors like us who have kept up.

“It's a big it's a big risk for a lot of MSPs right now that they're on an outdated email security stack. But there is a solution there.”

Money talks

Scott Barlow, chief evangelist and global head of community at Sophos urged partners to not be scared to talk about the price of services.

"What we see is a lot of MSPs still have a checkbox, and they could be using a free AV tool, and it's rampant,” he said.

“Same thing with some of the other legacy vendors, but I think the opportunity for MSPs today is to learn from the vendors and go through the vendors training and certification.”

Barlow noted that he has MSPs saying to him that they don’t have time to go through a half an hour course, which he doesn’t respect.

“[I say] well, you should probably not be a partner of ours because you don't understand the pricing, you don't understand the deployment, how to configure, how to deploy,” he said.

“Then it's probably not a good match if you don't have 30 minutes to learn how to make a ton of money by selling my products and managing my products and integrating my products.”

Barlow said MSPs have an opportunity to align with vendors that match their future looking goals.

“Do you want to be security focused? You want to be AI driven? Do you want to be both?”

“Learning from the vendors, because we are on the cutting edge. Every single one of the vendors here, we're on the bleeding edge of technology and how to integrate AI into what we do on an everyday basis,” he added.

Xchange is run by CRN Australia’s parent company, The Channel Company. Xchange is coming to Australia in 2026.