Security resellers: "Don't wait for the butterfly effect"

Hulse joined Marshal8e6 from Oracle, where he was APAC director of security and identity management in the consulting division.

Prior to Oracle, he was business manager for security services for Cisco.

'There are a number of security awareness initiatives that take place throughout the year such as Privacy Week, Global Security Week and most recently e-Security Awareness Week.

These programs all contribute to raising awareness of IT security risks among businesses.

They also draw attention to the latest issues, such as social networking, online fraud and blended threats. However they do little to ensure security stays front of mind for businesses every day.

What these weeks do instead is create a certain "Butterfly Effect", where IT Managers flutter between the latest trends without actually setting a clear security strategy within the organisation.

Here in lies the biggest opportunity for resellers.

The channel needs to work with its customers closely to develop broad based plans that cover the myriad security threats businesses face.

The key is for resellers to consider how they can move from selling a point solution to delivering a full security strategy.

Resellers need to help customers build security plans to tackle the multifaceted areas of risk.

This can be achieved by separating possible threats into "manageable chunks" and then looking at the solutions available to assist businesses in overcoming these issues.

This places resellers in an important and advantageous position to advise their customers.

Organisations of all sizes continue to face the challenge of defending against increasingly sophisticated security threats.

The challenge for the channel is to build the necessary knowledge to play an advisory role.

Particularly with the increasing consolidation amongst security vendors, there is a need to stay ahead of emerging threats and to keep up with new solutions being marketed.

For example, one emerging threat that has caught the eye of resellers is blended threats.

Marshal8e6's Tracelabs recently found that 42 percent of current spam traffic contains web links to malware, making it the highest single type of threat today.

The nature of blended threats requires a sales approach that covers threats beyond traditional web crawling techniques, malware signatures and attachments.

There is a huge opportunity for resellers to re-visit their customers, conduct a risk assessment and build a solution-based strategy for protection against security threats.

Awareness weeks represent the tip of the iceberg in security threats and the channel plays an important role in helping customers implement sound security strategies, beyond the buzz words.'