Diversifying Security

On the mind of resellers
AVT IT is an IT systems integrator based in Melbourne. Its focus for the past 15 years has been to provide the SMB market with security managed services and networking data recovery for an organisation with sub-1000 seats.
Jason Price, technical consultant
at AVT, says its customers are starting to demand enterprise security solutions.

“We are finding a lot of vendors trying to be the ‘be all and end all’ for example for a reseller,” he says. “One example is Trend Micro, which has products ranging from anti-virus to spam but as a reseller it’s important to engage a number of different vendors as opposed to what a vendor wants you to sell,” he says.

Price says resellers in the market are in two mind-sets about selling. One set takes the vendor of choice and makes it fit; however, companies like AVT offer complementary products.

“I attend a number of seminars and think if you pay attention to the different kinds of threats that are out there, resellers need to take into account threats are now coming from different areas and are commercially different,” he says.

Price believes that back in the day when a virus was written by a 16-year-old, it was for fun and there were no monetary gains to be made from it. Now it’s all about making money from threats.

He also says that SMB customers are aware of security threats and at this point in time they just want to make sure they have their firewall and protection in place.

“They aren’t aware about what they need for threats coming from the Web. People are trying to hack into their network. We are also finding organisations are no longer a single site; even smaller organisations can have multiple sites running across multiple networks with WAN intricacies,” he says.

This is where a multiple solution comes in handy because a lot of vendors only have one particular desktop product and may know nothing about WANs, as vendors that sell WAN products know nothing about a desktop.

Craig Flowers, pre-sales manager at Express Data, believes one vendor can’t give end users total security – for example, just because they have RSA doesn’t mean they won’t have anti-virus and spam products from other vendors.

“It’s been going on for some time and will continue for a lot longer as there are less vendors to choose from because niche players are being subsumed through consolidation,” Flowers says.

Continuing the IT security of a business goes beyond the office. Flowers believes you don’t have to be inside the office as attacks are rife and can occur beyond the traditional four walls.

“The arrival of the [cruise ship] QE2 caused the City of Sydney to come to a standstill. The APEC conference will also bring far worse problems to Sydney. Resellers will be out there thinking about remote access and security and they have to make sure firewalls are in place,” he says.

“This is where the need for education to prevent an organisation breaking down is important. As a distributor, Express Data doesn’t favour any one solution, we educate resellers about the right vendor. Larger resellers out there will have access to five or six key vendors. Why should it be any different for the smaller guys?” Flowers says.

Correlating the products
Nick Verykios, marketing director of Distribution Central (previously known as Firewall Systems), believes organisations should be worried about a prevention policy, which relates back to a security policy with technology overlays that is not made by security vendors.

“The security landscape is going to be about the securing of infrastructure versus the network versus the end user,” Verykios says.
“It’s not just a vendor doing everything, it means running four to five applications out of 20,” he says. “However, the end user will say they want central management and throw it on a box run dual layer with anti-virus on one gateway.”

Verykios goes on to say that it is very different from the past vendor mentality of ‘I have built something – you need to work around what I have built’. He says the reseller is being asked, ‘Can you get this and that product from the end-user?’

“These guys are saying we don’t even know what the threats are and you can’t detect the unknown then prevent it from occurring in the first place.”
Verykios explains that major integrators and any resellers have a multiple vendor approach for that reason – to prevent an attack.

“Different vendors can create the perfect solution for resellers to go out and sell as one holistic solution. It is a lot better than them going out and saying their one vendor product is the best,” he says.
“Resellers can’t keep it stale because security has changed and end users are getting information which is readily available to them so they will end up one step ahead of the reseller.”

There are some vendors out there that acknowledge that they are not in a position to do everything and are realistic about resellers having a multiple vendor approach.

Unixpac’s Piotrowski says people do realise they need to cover all holes in the security space.

However, he also believes that suppliers don’t realise patching it with multiple vendors will not to solve all problems.

“Sometimes it can be a case of the more you have the more you have to watch and correlate. When you install various devices on the network the reports that are generated can turn out events that have happened into a false positive,” he says. “Something is happening but not necessarily reported because you have to watch out for something else happening on the network and correlate the information.”

Piotrowski believes as security matures more technologies will be needed to view from a management perspective how the network is going. Many devices aren’t working in sync to achieve a certain level of security, which is important to establish whether or not everything is working correctly.

“People are concerned and even in big enterprises things still happen, that’s why you have banks armed to the teeth because they are constantly subject to attacks. Resellers must evaluate their customers’ technology because there is a certain life span to products,” Piotrowski explains.

“You can’t buy a firewall and assume it will protect you today because hackers never sleep, so they will try to bypass all security products. There needs to be a continuous flow and integrity to a customer’s network.