What I See Coming For The Channel: 2021 Jay McBain, Principal Analyst, Channel Partnerships & Alliances Jan 21 2021
Last year ended up being a tale of two cities for the channel. On one hand, customers and governments recognized partners as an essential service and central to their ability to rapidly respond to a worsening pandemic early in the year. With catlike reflexes, the IT channel emptied the laptop supply chain and became unified-communications-as-a-service experts to deploy a new remote topology around the world. Check out how I did on last year’s predictions here. The remote topology also required a new defense against rapidly changing security threat vectors, new levels of risk mitigation and compliance, rethinking of business continuity, and support for a “residential network” of consumer-grade equipment and networks getting access to enterprise-class data and systems.