Are you currently planning on how you will be distributing your 2018 funding? It’s never too early to look ahead to 2019, either. You need to anticipate the products that you’ll need beyond next year, too. Here are four essential IT vendors that enterprise businesses will need by 2019.

Vendor Risk Management

Image via Flickr by Yu. Samoilov

Few businesses handle all of their IT needs in-house. You likely use other vendors and freelancers for some tasks and outsource others to third party partners. When you outsource your work, you’re also increasing your liability. You may have security protocols and practices that all of your workers follow. The outsiders won’t, though, and that makes these enterprises the weakest link in your chain.

Should an external IT group suffer a breach, and the breach includes loss of your data, you may be responsible for it. Vendor risk management (VRM) reduces your vulnerability.  Many software products as Jakarta have added this form of security, which is part of their Governance, Risk, and Compliance portfolio. You should follow Java’s lead by implementing your own VRM program.

Cybersecurity Vendors

Security is an issue in all phases of IT. Your cybersecurity practices directly impact the viability of your breach. Should you suffer a breach, you’ll suffer the same loss of customers and public humiliation that companies like Equifax have. That may sound extreme, but the risk is larger than you appreciate. Some forward-thinking companies have gone so far as to adopt and “assume-breach” mentality, where they believe that it’s not a matter of “if” but rather “when” that they’ll suffer data breach.

When you use enterprise software, you’re employing centralized data. Should someone hack into your system, the centralization makes your important information easy to parse. Cybersecurity vendors want to reduce your stress about this issue. These companies have consolidated their offerings. They can provide all the middleware and cloud services that you need through common architecture. It’s an end-to-end security system that quickens detection and improves response time. Hiring a cybersecurity vendor is a forward-thinking strategy to secure your data.

Cloud Access Security Brokers

Your business uses the cloud because of the myriad of advantages that it comes with. Not only does it provide the scalability and stability that is required of a growing business or enterprises, it can also bring tremendous cost savings and productivity boost.

The problem with using cloud services is that unlike traditional software where data was stored inside the perimeter and network security was the most important aspect of securing corporate data, cloud services use datacenters that are dispersed across geographical regions. Traditional security measures such as end-point protection and firewalls are useless when it comes to securing data stored in or moving to cloud services such as Office 365, Box, or Google Drive. Enter cloud access security brokers (CASBs).

CASBs are a burgeoning cloud security technology with immense promise of securing enterprise cloud deployments. CASBs act as a control point for securing cloud applications. They do for the cloud what traditional SIEMs, end-point protection, and data loss prevention did for on-premises IT infrastructure. Gartner’s CASB Magic Quadrant, when released, will identify the top-ranked CASBs. CASBs are already considered a must have security technology for any organization that uses multiple cloud SaaS products.

Platform-as-a-Service

With your security vastly improved, you can prioritize revenue expansion. One of the largest growth areas for cloud users is a platform-as-a-service (PAAS). This technology gives users the ability to manage and run applications in the cloud without having to construct or maintain the infrastructure involved. Rather than use off-the-shelf software, you can build your own that customers will pay you to use in the cloud! It’s a growth industry that KMPG projects will have 56 percent adoption by 2020. By acting now, you can make inroads in a growth industry.

When you spend your IT budget, you can secure your company beyond the short-term. Use these four suggestions to guarantee that your business is strong in 2019 — and beyond!