How to survive selling security

“A lot of people think that security is about securing applications and controlling the bad things. But you need to have 24/7 access to your data wherever you are. Whether there’s a flood in Queensland or you’re at home or at another office, access is a security issue,” Labza says.

“If the company is in the cloud then multiple links have to be created for the company to get there. The links have to be up 24/7 and you have to have security to protect those links.

“You can’t just have one link; it has to be a high-quality, expensive link. How am I going to manage traffic up and down this link and make sure my business doesn’t stop?”

In accordance with this broader vision, security vendors are making appliances that improve the functioning of a network rather than just protect it.

Blue Coat’s ProxySG appliance maximises network bandwidth and performance by caching regularly accessed files.

If 100 employees in a company need to watch a training video online they will start streaming 100 copies of the same video over

that internet connection. The ProxySG caches the video on the local network, leaving the connection to handle internet traffic from other staff.

Sorting the sheep

High-speed connections need to have greater awareness of the type of device that is connecting to them. For example, a connection should give greater priority to a corporate network over a guy with an iPhone, Labza says.

If the vendors are breaking out from a conventional idea of security, what should their resellers do?

Resellers have to be aware of how their vendors are changing and how the market is changing.

“A lot of vendors have availability and performance stories. Availability and performance is crucial to the cloud. If you are a reseller that says ‘I‘m just security’ and miss the other components to the story, then they miss out on what else the vendors have and what the customers are asking for,” Labza says.

Vendors also talk about the importance of visibility. “You have to look into a network to know what to do with it.”

Distribution Central is launching Firewall Systems version two in May, with a marketing and education campaign that will reposition itself with resellers as a broader security distributor than just firewalls.