Simplify and Comply

Guest blogger Paul Judd from Fortinet says it's time to take away the pain

If I had my time again, I might come back as a lawyer. In exchange for driving people to distraction by making things far more complicated than then need to be, you can charge them pretty much whatever you like. Seriously though, breeding unnecessary complexity is a short-term game at best.

Compliance auditors can spread sheer terror with one flick of their pencils, and the resulting laundry list of remedies would keep an IT department busy for months. One school of thought it seems is to devise highly complex security, management and reporting solutions to the problem. The other is to just remove all that complexity with a common solution-set that also reduces cost and reduces risk. I know which one gets my vote.

Compliance to IT standards like PCI and others is still a sticky business for organisations, but clearly the opportunity for resellers is to take that pain away. Perhaps it's time to demystify compliance requirements a little, and starting appreciating that at the end of the day, many customers are being driven hard to confidently and unreservedly put a tick in the box. Fail to grasp that reality and overlook the true wishes of a customer in need.

Paul Judd (pictured) is regional director for UK, Ireland and South Africa at Fortinet.

Read his thoughts all this week on Views from the Channel.