The rise of AI-fuelled attacks means channel partners should switch to helping customers pursue an “outside-in” approach to cyber security.
That’s according to the EMEA CTO of Everpure, the data management and storage vendor which in February rebranded from Pure Storage following its acquisition of 1touch.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Patrick Smith said the rise of AI-fuelled attacks means customers and partners should flip how they think about cyber resilience “on its head”.
Anthropic’s recent claims that it can now identify security vulnerabilities in software via Claude Mythos are causing organisations to “panic”, Smith said.
“With the latest AI-powered threat to IT environments, the time from exploit identified to exploit being leveraged in the wild has shrunk massively. We expect to see zero-day vulnerabilities go through the roof,” he said.
“Organisations need to take an outside-in approach, where you assume the perimeter is porous and that an attacker can walk through the front door and get to your data.
“How can you ensure that, if everything else fails, you have a data copy of last resort with which you can recover your environment?
“That’s been the key area of focus for us with our technology: making sure we have that ability to give the channel partners a confident position for their customers to say, ‘you can recover your environment when all else fails’.”
1touch traction
Everpure has undergone a “significant evolution” in how it positions itself over the last 18 months, Smith revealed.
This kicked off with the introduction of its Enterprise Data Cloud, which Smith said has enabled its partners to move from simply reselling storage arrays to offering a data management platform.
“1touch takes it up to the data level,” he said.
On the back of 1touch, Everpure has added critical data context capabilities that shift recovery from blind restores to intelligent prioritisation, Smith said.
“Our CEO [Charles Giancarlo] said he didn’t want to change the name until we did something beyond storage, and pushed up to the data layer – and 1touch is our first step up to dealing with customers’ data,” he said.
“That becomes particularly important as we look at this changing cyber landscape.
“One of the first things organisations need to do is understand what their business-critical systems are, and what the data is that underpins and supports those business-critical systems – because you don’t want to protect everything to the same level; that would become incredibly expensive and wasteful.
“The ability for 1touch to identify all the data within an organisation, and understand the context, criticality and sensitivity of that data so that organisations can take tangible steps to prioritise what they need to protect first, is incredibly important.
“It’s fantastic for the partners, because they add another string to their bow to help address the challenges organisations have been trying to deal with for years: where’s my critical data? Where does it sit? How’s it protected?
“You’ll continue to see the capabilities of Enterprise Data Cloud evolve to provide more capabilities for our customers, so that our partners can become more relevant to the challenges customers are facing.”
SafeMode superiority
Expanding on Everpure’s approach to data recovery, Smith claimed the NYSE-listed vendor has the whip hand over competitors.
“For us, recovering as quickly as possible means recovering from snapshots – not just standard snapshots, but snapshots that absolutely can’t be tampered with, modified or deleted,” he said.
“We achieve that through a capability we call SafeMode. That provides our partners with something that’s unique in the industry. All snapshots are immutable in that they can’t be changed, but not all snapshots are indelible.”
In Q1 results unveiled last week, Everpure saw revenues for the three months to 3 May 2026 power up 35% year on year to $1.1bn.
Smith was quick to attribute the vendor’s rising fortunes to its channel partners.
“We had incredibly strong growth in Q1, and we’re proud of that. It’s a reflection of the great work done by our channel partners,” Smith concluded.
This article was produced in association with Everpure and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
