Unified not necessarily universal

The IT channel must learn to specialise, warns Matt Robinson

Many IT departments are introducing virtualised IT, cloud-based applications and data storage, unified communications, and mobile device programmes.

If they are lucky, there will be a moment of calm before they are hit by the impact of employee-owned devices and big data.

I have read that some workers now connect up to four devices to the corporate network every day. Some of these belong to the company, but increasingly many do not.

As a result, IT departments are in danger of losing visibility of all the devices carrying company data, or even a say in what happens to the data or the devices.

Furthermore, IT departments are failing to pay enough attention to securing corporate mobile devices and the data stored on them. Many do not use dedicated mobile device management offerings, which puts them at high risk of data breaches.

IT departments need to be able to protect every device, server and employee from cyberattack. This threat is real and increasing. Today we detect about 200,000 new malicious programs every day, up from 70,000 just a year ago.

Unsurprisingly, cybercriminals are focusing much of their energy on finding and exploiting points of weakness in the latest technologies.

All this is both good news and bad news for the channel.

Many companies are overwhelmed by trying to deal with these trends and their implications for centralised IT management, security and resource efficiency. Resellers can help ease this pain.

This brings us to the bad news: anticipating, understanding and addressing such needs demands skills and expertise, not generalised box-shifting.

It is about getting under the skin of each individual customer and offering expertise in one or more new technologies that customer wants to introduce. Agility, flexibility and modularity must become bywords. It is time to specialise or die.

Does that sounds a little extreme? Specialising offers resellers the opportunity to differentiate their offerings and expertise – a trend that is being replayed across the services and retail sectors.

Matthew Robinson is UK B2B sales and marketing director at Kaspersky Lab