Our first Scale Play out the gate is Security, and for good reason. The security opportunity with the small business segment is immense.

• 72% of small businesses say they have experienced a cyber-attack in the past year and the average cost of a compromise is $1.24 million.

Small businesses need a comprehensive, integrated, and open security platform that can cover every threat vector. The security platform also has to be simple with a quick time to detection. At the same time, Small Businesses need the flexibility to choose the security products that work best for them, without compromising protection.

Here are the value-adds for you, our partners:

• The scale play helps you sell security and position more Cisco products together — which helps grow revenue and deliver a better experience for customers.
• Many of our security offers, including Umbrella and Duo, are software offers that require no inventory to manage, have free demos and trials that are proven to convert to sales, and drive recurring revenue for you, with extremely high renewal rates.
• Security gives you a massive opportunity to sell high-margin professional and managed services, such as managed SOC, incident response, and implementation, which small businesses need because they lack security expertise in-house.
• Security is a strategic discussion that can tap in to multiple budget areas, such as risk and compliance, helping you sidestep budget shortages that might affect traditional technology investments in times of recession.
• Cisco is the world’s largest cybersecurity vendor, with great analyst ratings and several unique differentiators, such as Talos that will help you more reliably close deals versus point vendors.

To help protect organizations dealing with new challenges amidst COVID-19, such as an increase in remote workers, Cisco is providing extended trial license periods and expanded usage counts at no extra charge for various security technologies.