VARs should address virtual security

Peter Craig says consumerisation and virtualisation represent an opportunity for targeted security sales

Customers are facing more threats to their increasingly diverse computing environments, while continued economic instability puts greater pressure on IT teams to do more with less.

I think that all channel firms should be looking to tap into the current trend for consumerisation with a view to improving their sales.

Organisations of all size are finding that employees want to use their own, or primarily consumer-focused, hardware and software in the workplace. This includes social networking tools such as Facebook, communications platforms such as Skype or Gmail, and a plethora of smartphones and tablets that are on the market. This is a real headache for the IT team that secures and manages it all.

I believe that when a customer is approaching resellers with a problem linked to consumerisation, he or she is probably seeking a solution for a specific tactical problem, such as the risk of confidential data leaking out of the corporate network via Facebook, or users downloading malware-ridden apps to their smartphones.

This, I think, is a golden opportunity to broaden the conversation into why consumer technologies should be used in the workplace and how the channel can help the customer enable this while staying secure.

The reseller plays the role of educator and trusted partner, while offering a range of security and management offerings. But this shouldn't be a reactive process. Channel partners should be approaching potential customers to promote the benefits of embracing consumerisation, such as cost savings and productivity improvements.

One effect of consumerisation and the proliferation of smartphones is the virtualisation of desktop infrastructure, with conventional endpoints increasingly being swapped for a more mobile and flexible virtual IT setup. SaaS feeds off this mobility trend as well.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and anything cloud related may be provided by an organisation's datacentre team, which may be a rather less familiar entity than the traditional endpoint team. Resellers would do well to ask their vendors to help them forge these new relationships with customers.

What really matters in the datacentre is data security and performance, in my view. If a channel partner, for example, can prove that certain products can help a customer get a 300-fold improvement in virtual machine (VM) density, this could help the datacentre team ensure the business's RoI.

Encryption is another offering that should not be forgot, especially when it comes to customer fears that their mission-critical VMs may be sharing the same hypervisor as less secure third-party VMs, for example.

In the end it's all about spotting the trends and refocusing your efforts to meet customers' changing needs. Think of the vendor too as a trusted advisor and together you can help customers work in more efficient, productive and secure ways.

Peter Craig is a senior EMEA product marketing manager at Trend Micro