Partners at TechX Sydney muse on what security partners will look like by 2030

Looking ahead to what capabilities a credible security partner needs to distinguish themselves by 2030 had partners talking at Dicker Data TechX 2026.

The biennial TechX event roadshow, which began this year in mid-August in Perth and previously headed to Brisbane and Melbourne, concluded at the ICC last week. 

Robert Nad, Infotrust’s Product Manager – Cloud and Modern Workplace, stated that security partners moving forward will need to have the ability to bring multiple disciplines together to serve a business or customer outcome.  

“Cybersecurity no longer is just the security team. It's gone broader now, so we've got identity, data [and] governance [so] it's important that a partner can bring those pieces together in the one place and provide a purposeful outcome,” he said. 

“At Infotrust, we've already identified the capabilities that we need to grow and build moving beyond [the next] three years, five years - we are establishing multiple different capabilities around identity, data, security governance around AI, that'll help us bring together a breadth of our capabilities so we can be that one-stop shop that customers can rely on.” 

For Damon Snape – GM of Cyber Security and Network at Ethan - a similar view emerged, with credible security partners moving forward into 2030 being those that are “really tight” with their governance and security around AI.  

“Customers are using AI; they want to know that they've got a partner that's got strong compliance frameworks in place, has acceptable use policies that understands how businesses need to govern and secure their environments and have those practices in place themselves,” he shared.  

“Those organisations that can focus on outcomes, not just tool enablement, that's really key.”  

Snape said that as customer needs have shifted more towards outcomes, the role of partners has now become helping them deliver an outcome rather than merely integrating a new tool.  

“Can you deploy this tool? Yeah, we can, but we want to deliver an outcome for you,” he explained.

“If I'm a customer, I don't want to wait for a monthly report or go and log on to a portal to get a dashboard that's going to tell me something that happened three or four weeks ago. I want real-life data. I want to know what my security posture looks like. Am I protected? Do I have any exposures? What are my policy enforcement?

"Organisations that can bring all of that together – the compliance piece, that security governance, being able to protect, defend, monitor, recover, increase resiliency and reduce risk - their organisations are going to be set to be successful in the future.” 

On a different tack, Pennie Stevens, Dicker Data’s General Manager of the company's Software business unit, said the distributor tries to break down the barriers to success in three ways to enable partners to succeed.  

“Procurement and reporting and any way that we can help them with the tracking of what they're offering with their end users; helping them skill up faster and enable their salespeople and their technical people; and then finally their go to market,” she said. 

“We've got marketing people, product managers, people who can really help [partners] work out what's the opportunity for them in their market and how to make the most of it. With those three things, we feel like we can really escalate and get [partners] growing faster.” 

Arsenio Mendoza, Dicker Data’s Dynamics 365 Practice Lead for ANZ, said that through working with partners in the company’s Partner to Partner Program, the distributor can help partners qualify opportunities with the incumbent partner and then connect them in with a partner that they could collaborate with on the opportunity together and be successful not only in winning the business, but also on the delivery of the actual project.

“There's a win-win-win - there's a win for the customer [as] they're working with an experienced partner that can deliver on the project; the incumbent partner also has a win because they've got services revenue as well as the stickiness with the customer; and then the partner that's being introduced wins because there's a customer and revenue that's coming in that may not have been [there] in their own experience and travels,” he shared. 

“That's where we can definitely facilitate that partner-to-partner collaboration across our channel."

techpartner.news is the official media partner of Dicker Data TechX 2026.