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While policy design, firewall configuration and managed firewalls had been hot areas in 2004, Nick Verykios, marketing director of security distributor Firewall Systems, says the demand
in 2005 will be around heuristics, neural networking and behaviour analysis.

With traditional, physical security providers amongst Firewall Systems’ customers, Verykios says IT security resellers need to begin taking a managed security approach or they risk losing customers to established security firms that are expanding their service offerings to include data.

"Security is a new kind of sale -- it’s selling business continuity and risk management. We’re trying to build policy experts in our reseller base, and get them close to the Holy Grail -- owning the customer."
Verykios says the managed security model is vendor-agnostic, because end users do not want to buy a name brand security product.

"The customer wants to buy an SLA. It has to make sense to the board of directors, who are interested in risk mitigation, and to the CEO, who is interested in business continuity.

"It’s a security solution wrapped in finance and sold with a monthly bill for ongoing maintenance and monitoring."