Diversifying Security

Future of selling security
Resellers need to focus on providing their customers with a holistic approach as part of their package.

It’s no longer enough to say ‘we can offer services’, and vendors have been dangling the service carrot for many years. There are educated customers wanting to find out about plugging all the holes in their IT security.

Right now the security landscape is all about bringing out the best of breed, which also needs to operate cohesively together – the more ease of use, the better the products are for the end user. If resellers spend all their time fixing their customers’ computers, when will they have time to up-sell other areas of services they have available?

When Websense’s Camissar speaks to resellers he finds that foremost in their mind is the gap between what anti-virus vendors are able to capture and what threats are out there.

“I had a day of meetings in Canberra in March with Government agency organisations and they brought up the fact that no anti-virus vendor had a filter for the trojan horse virus. None of the contact filtering vendors were protected from the horse because new forms of variants were bypassing multi-layers of defence threats,” says Camissar.
“The threats were continually evolving and it was becoming harder to keep up with the hackers.”

He believes because of this environment it is worth resellers asking vendors about complementary technologies being adopted. Resellers don’t want to look at vendors that won’t be around for the long run because there is a level of complexity that has come back to the security market due to the Internet. A recent report issued by Yankee Group for the Symantec, RSA, Cypher Trust and Websense, states that 79 percent of all threats were Web-based.

“These hackers are driven by profit and that is the far-reaching motive in the hacking community; they have changed the rules of the game and it has become harder for traditional technologies to keep pace with the threats. Resellers need to continue to relook at their portfolio, otherwise they leave the door open for other resellers to come in,” says Camissar.

While local organisations are busy with securing their computer, AVT’s Price says it is never too late for SMB resellers to look at securing data within an organisation – after all they are the front line fighters for many sub-1000 seat organisations.

“A company’s need to access data from anywhere can put valuable data at risk. We only have a few customers that have engaged in locking down information. It’s never too early to look at these types of issues because an organisation’s data is its bread and butter,” he says.

“Once compliance issues and regulatory issues come to Australia the way thay have in the US, organisations will have no choice but to make sure their company information is secure, wherever it is. However, a lot of resellers at
the moment are ill prepared for it,” Price says.

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