For organisations too big to outsource all security functions and too small to have their own IT army, the mid-market occupies an often undefined swath that represents a wide open playing field for solution providers. Why? Channel partners can leverage the mid-market’s complexity and diversity to determine and then deploy solutions specifically tailored to meet the needs of their end-user customers. And the possibilities are endless.
Guru Prasad, GM, strategic alliances and channel development at regional distributor FVC, says the antivirus and anti-spam market is one of the continuous growing markets considering the ever-changing protection that organisations need against an ever-evolving viruses and spam threats.
Prasad says channel partners need to focus on several areas including new greenfield implementations, renewals (most tend to downplay these opportunities but these can be a great source of repeat business), conversions from on-premise to hosted models, and finally SMEs who have inadequate protection. “Surprisingly, there are still organisations that do not have adequate protection,” he says.
Neo Neophytou, MD, of ADAOX Middle East, agrees and says that the antivirus/anti-spam market is growing at a faster rate as the awareness about the need to have a genuine anti-virus solution is growing. Neophytou says people have also realised the importance of having a good antivirus/anti-spam solution to protect their computers while they use them without any hassles. “Users now consider a good antivirus solution as a necessity and this has resulted in more users moving away from pirated antivirus software to genuine products,” he says.
Neophytou says channel partners should focus on their strengths as the competition is stiff due to the effects of the economic slowdown. The SME segment is ideal for partners looking for new opportunities.
IT Threats
Judhi Prasetyo, regional channel manager at Fortinet, says the monthly Threatscape report showed high activity from multiple botnets, namely Gumblar and Sasfis. In addition, Prasetyo says vulnerabilities from Microsoft, and Adobe, Ransomware and Scareware still top virus detection. “Scareware has been consistently prevalent since September 2008,” he notes. “Ransomware, on the other hand, began making headway in 2010 due to incentives from affiliate-backed programs that pay out when victims purchase fake products.”
Prasetyo says Fortinet also continues to observe the Cutwail spambot, which has been active for years and sends various spam campaigns for its customers. “The spam sent by Cutwail recently typically included malicious links to eCard binaries or emails with the binaries themselves attached,” he says. “There were various money mule recruitment themes observed in spam emails this report, showing a growing demand for jobs on the black market.”
Prasad adds that other than Botnets, key loggers and trojans, a new type of threat related to applications has emerged. Social Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin have several vulnerabilities that are increasingly being exploited, he says. “New vulnerabilities with Adobe PDF readers and editors and several Microsoft vulnerabilities are a constant threat to unpatched end points,” he says.
Prasad says FVC has been in the forefront when it comes to selling email and gateway antivirus, anti-spam and security technologies. “We represent key vendors such as Google and Barracuda in this space covering both the on-premise and hosted models for email and Web security,” he says.
Prasad points out that the first priority for channel partners should be to cover the existing customers well and ensuring that renewals are followed up and converted. Secondly, Prasad says they need to approach competitive customer bases with innovative solutions such as hosted services, if they have on-premise or resell internet security suites as a majority of customers only use an antivirus and security engine on their desktops,” he says.
According to Prasad, another market that is still untapped is the smartphone security market which would be an additional business driver. “Most importantly, always keep an eye for greenfield implementations whether with an enterprise or an SME.
Neophytou concurs and says millions of malware are released every month and it is important that antivirus/anti-spam solutions should have a great proactive detection system such as ESET’s, which is an absolute must. “Trojans and Rootkits are also becoming more common and harder to detect. Password stealing programs and phishing attacks have also increased,” he says. “ESET has incorporated removable media security in its products. ESET has also improved the detection and cleaning algorithm with Version 4.2 to give better protection against malware attacks.”
Neophytou says his company has also incorporated SysRescue and Sysinspector tools along with the product for system diagnosis and cleaning. “ESET has also come up with an improved version of remote admin Console for Business users to help manage the clients centrally across larger networks,” he says.
Neophytou says resellers should be able to give technical support when required by the clients. “Having a good technical team will give the partners an opportunity to build a good reputation and thus retain their clients,” he says.
The proliferation of mobile devices
FVC’s Prasad says the first challenge is choosing a vendor that integrates security levels well, from the gateway to servers as well as end points including mobile devices. Secondly, according to Prasad, it is vital that resellers are aware of what the cost of managing these solutions on a day to day basis like engine updates. “Choosing vendors who support zero day initiatives is important,” he says. There is no such thing as 100% protection but it is important to have a strategy that covers network behaviour and application visibility that gives you added protection over and above end-point security, he observes.
Neophytou says a good security solution should be able to take care of all the end-points as more people have now started using mobile phones and laptops for business purposes. “ESET provides special protection for laptops using roaming profiles and has a special mobile antivirus that protects mobile phones,” he says.
Prasetyo adds that Fortinet, as a network security solutions vendor and provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, the company focuses on a holistic approach to security. “While antivirus/anti-spam is part of all its UTM and security offerings, FortiGuard Subscription Services for FortiGate and FortiMail appliances offer comprehensive security solutions including antivirus, intrusion prevention, Web content filtering and anti-spam capabilities,” he says. “FortiGuard Services are continuously updated, which enables Fortinet to deliver a combination of multi-layered security intelligence and true zero-day protection from new and emerging threats.”
Prasetyo says these services enable protection against threats on both application and network layers. “The market for antivirus/anti-spam is still growing in line with increasing awareness about IT security supported by the strengthening economic situation in Middle East,” he says.
Prasetyo says that because security affects all business sectors, big or small, there are potential business opportunities for channel partners in this market segment. “Most partners have strengths in certain sectors and focusing on these segments would probably yield the best business results for them,” he observes.
However, Prasetyo says that the challenge from a technical perspective is that there are hundreds of handset models in the market, making it difficult for service providers to provide support for security applications that run on the various platforms. “Fortinet does offer an ‘in-the-cloud’ security solution that could well resolve some of these technical problems,” he says.
Fighting DLP
Alexei Lesnykh, business developer manager at security vendor DeviceLock, says in recent years, the Internet has become one of the most powerful means of communication, mostly thanks to the rapidly growing use of personal blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Lesnykh says what is becoming even more popular is the fact that users are now able to transmit short announcements and updates via mobile phones connected to the Internet. “Individuals and even companies now have the possibility to communicate and share information with everyone,” he says. “Everyone nowadays has the proper means to disseminate their views.”
Lesnykh says there are many legitimate reasons for an employee to connect a smart-phone to their office PC and run a local synchronisation for data transfer. However, anyone with an illegitimate purpose in mind, like data theft, knows that such transfers completely bypass the corporate network and cannot be controlled by any network-based security solutions,” he says.
He says an all-or-nothing approach – when all smart-phones are either allowed or prohibited to sync locally with a particular computer is too risky. “Organisations need a means of defining and enforcing permissions on a more flexible, granular basis,” he says “Our customers already count on DeviceLock for permissions-based management of removable storage devices, so it’s a natural extension to cover local syncs by popular smart-phone platforms,” he says. “With DeviceLock in place, IT security organisations can impose a ‘least privilege’ mobile device policy that limits data exchanges to only specific smart-phones and to only the types of data required for exercising an employee’s business duties.”
However, Lesnykh says as more people are connected 24/7, unavoidable risks come to the fore. “With an increasing number of people sharing an endless stream of data and information, via their handhelds, laptops, smart-phones and now iPads, they run the risk of their devices being attacked by spam and/or viruses, and other threats,” he warns. “The worst part is that few people seem to be aware of the diverse and real risk, globally as well as here in the Middle East.”
Partner education
Prasetyo believes channel partners have a key role to play in ensuring that they provide a solution that matches their customer needs rather than a purely commercial deal, especially in an enterprise environment. “They should be educating the end user about the importance of “push update” technology which enables instant delivery of new antivirus signature to the customer whether it be desktop software or appliances like FortiGate and FortiMail.
Prasad adds that FVC runs several tech cafe initiatives for partners and customers on cyber security which focuses on email and Web security threats and mitigation workshops. “In addition, we run threat landscape Webinars regularly through TippingPoint which focuses on the latest threats and mitigation techniques applied to protect against these threats,” he says.
Prasad explains that FVC is running several incentive programmes as well as training workshops to keep partner skills updated as well as provide a platform for them to sell their customers the latest in the security domain. “We have recently launched the channel enablement, empowerment and rewards (CHEER) programme which helps partners through the cycle of incubating new emerging technologies within their organisations and generate revenue and profits from selling advanced technologies in security among others.
Prasad says to complement the training initiatives, FVC also offers certifications such as CISSP & CISM. “We periodically run vendor certifications programmes with TippingPoint, Barracuda, and Google to add to existing industry certifications,” he says.
ADAOX’s Neophytou says his company conducts training sessions for its channel partners which are aimed at educating and informing them about the key rules that the users should follow to keep the systems and networks safe. “We also send out technical newsletters on a regular basis so that partners are always kept updated about the latest developments,” he says. “We advise our partners to ensure that their clients keep their operating systems and software duly patched and to also make sure that their anti-virus systems are being properly updated.”
Neophytou says ADAOX also conducts regular product training sessions and runs channel reward programmes to ensure that partners go all out to promote the advantages of ESET in their customer base. “We are currently running a 3-for-1 promotion for our retail partners,” he says.
Fortinet’s Prasetyo adds that although the company does not have a specific channel programme for front-end security, these and other products and services are covered in our Fortinet Partner Programme (FPP). “We help to identify and share opportunities with our partners through this programme, empowering them with information that will help them with their end-user customers. Fortinet periodically conducts certification trainings, workshops and online/Web seminars to ensure that partners are adequately educated and updated with the latest technologies,” he concludes.
Stealing information and hacking into networks is big business for cybercriminals. In fact today, organised crime is largely involved and information, such as credit card data and other personal information, is sold to the highest bidder. Forget the days of hacking for notoriety. Today it’s all about money. For savvy solution providers, the IT security market offers a lot of opportunities.
