customer account management to ensure a full understanding of clients’ requirements, scoping the appropriate technologies and services, and setting the right expectations,” Saupin says.
Integrators should limit themselves to working with one or two vendors, with only the biggest integrators stretching to three, warns Gartner principal research analyst Bjarne Munch. “We generally don’t see them go beyond that because it takes such an effort just to get to know even one vendor and become really familiar with their solution.”
Voice-over-IP and Microsoft Windows will loom large as two key security issues in 2007, foresees Ovum’s Kennedy. “In the VoIP area, many enterprise networks are still vulnerable to a range of attacks, principally voice spam and phishing, toll fraud and denial of service attacks.
“The challenge for resellers and integrators is that most vendors are still focused on the public Internet, at the expense of IP VPN products that can be deployed in the enterprise environment.”
Resellers and integrators will need to take leadership here, build their own security capabilities and implement a range of bespoke solutions until the vendors better address the enterprise, Kennedy says. “As for Windows, the healthy industry for security products reflects the vulnerability of XP.
“Microsoft has invested heavily in its Trustworthy Computing initiative and Vista will bear some of the fruit. For resellers and integrators, this improved, though not perfect, security should be a strong selling point for Vista,” Kennedy says.
Security will be a key driver in other areas such as mobility, Voice-over-Wi-Fi, infrastructure optimisation, WAN optimisation, remote infrastructure management and employee productivity, predicts distributor Firewall Systems’ managing director Nick Verykios.
“Ultimately, threat management is now part of the DNA of every facet of IT. We don’t know about the threats we will be protecting against tomorrow so the approach is to take an intrusion prevention approach, as opposed to old school intrusion detection. These preventative strategies, locked into other technologies in key growth areas, will free up significant budgets to invest into security,” Verykios says.
Other hot security areas in 2007 will include network access control and quarantine, patch management and configuration management, says PatchLink A/NZ sales director Chris Wood. “There is great demand for organisations to open up their networks to users, customers, business partners and contractors, and this has significant security implications. At the same time, the threat landscape has changed with the motivation for compromising computing resources moving from fun to profit. As a result, security can no longer just be reliant on technologies such as firewalls, anti-virus, IPD/ IDS and IPSEC based VPNs as these technologies can merely block to problem and not fix it,” Wood says.
Resellers and integrators should look at segmenting the market into high-end, mid-range and entry-level and have a clear understanding of the threat landscape in each segment, says Symantec’s Asia Pacific and Japan Channels vice-president, John Donovan. “In the high-end, there should be a balance between security and availability, with a focus on compliance, while in the mid-range, focus should be on cost
Tech to drive your profits next year
By
Adam Turner
on Jan 10, 2007 11:25AM
Page 2 of 4 | Single page
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