The success of RSA’s RSA ID Plus IAM solution, which supports on-prem and hybrid environments as well as SaaS, has led RSA, which has a long history in Canada, to deepen its Canadian commitment by launching a new cloud tenant, their first Canadian data centre.
Brian Breton, Americas Channel Lead at RSA
Cybersecurity and IAM [Identity and Access Management] firm RSA has been in the Canadian market for over a quarter century, and has a strong presence here. Until recently, however, that was largely an on-prem business, although they did have their RSA ID IAM cloud solution. More recently however, they introduced RSA ID Plus, which in addition to supporting cloud also supports hybrid, and on-premises configurations. This led to very strong growth in the Canadian market of 444% year over year. Now the company is doubling down on that growth, and will launch their first Canadian cloud tenant next year.
“Last year, RSA launched a very strong effort with our SaaS business,” said Brian Breton, Americas Channel Lead at RSA. “We introduced new pricing and packaging, and what made it very attractive for our large Canadian install base is that it provided an easy way to migrate from on-prem to SaaS, at their own pace. That’s the major reason for that huge 444% growth in Canada.” Overall SaaS sales in the Americas also grew at an exponential rate of 2X YoY over the same period, although this is less than half the Canadian rate.
The 444% number also reflects the fact that the SaaS hybrid version of RSA ID, RSA ID Plus, which has been very popular, is a new product.
“The RSA ID Plus solution was only launched last year,” Breton said. “Historically most of our business has been on-prem.”
Breton explained why the hybrid RSA ID Plus solution, has been so popular.
“We offered SaaS before, but if you wanted to go to SaaS from on-prem, you had to cut the cord and do a complete migration,” he said. “We evolved the solution to work in an on-prem situation as well, with licenses for both cloud and on-prem included. Customers jumped at this. They wanted to be able to migrate on their own time frame, and also leverage the installed on-prem solution that they already had. Some of them are still using their data centre solution while some have already moved some of their assets to cloud. Now they all have a path forward to the cloud.”
Breton said that the level of commitment to the cloud is the key factor in determining the types of companies who have gone with their hybrid SaaS solution.
“Regardless of company sizes and vertical markets, what differs in terms of interest in this is those who want to go all in on SaaS and just work in the cloud, and those who want a hybrid strategy,” he stated. “A lot of companies move to the cloud for convenience, because cloud can make it easy. Easy and security have a balance, however. RSA’s key differentiation is that we are a security-first company, where we lead with security but also balance ease of use and convenience.”
On the heels of that 444% increase in Canadian SaaS business, which was accompanied by increases in staff, partners, and distributors throughout Canada, RSA is making a major announcement to drive that business further. They have set in motions to launch a new cloud tenant – their first Canadian data centre – in Canada.
“This new cloud tenant will meet the growing demand,” Breton said. “Every cloud solution runs on a server somewhere. Our RSA cloud-based solutions have been running off a data center in the US, and we will soon be launching in Canada.” He indicated that they do not yet have a firm date when this will go live, but said that it will be in the first half of 2024.
The locations of the data centres are not being disclosed, although Breton indicated that for failover purposes, there will be more than one.
Breton said that the new data centre investment is only part of what RSA will be doing in Canada going forward.
“Canada is our fourth largest market in the world,” he indicated. “We are in every market in Canada, and we have been here for over 25 years. We have continued to grow our physical presence in Canada. We have colleagues and resources in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Calgary. Our Canadian business growth led us to commit to deploying this new cloud tenant, and we will continue to make investments.”
