Innovation to solve problems in better ways is likely to be the strongest driver of value propositions for resellers in the enterprise network market, says an industry expert.
"Security is a greater concern than performance and quality of service and is where the market is going to look for differentiation," says Graham Vorster, CTO of Enterasys reseller Duxbury Networking.
Recognising the need to pursue a new value proposition in the enterprise market, Vorster says Enterasys follows a holistic systems approach to security.
"This contrasts with the traditional silos of intelligence or point solutions that do not offer co‑ordinated, watertight security protection."
Vorster says the need for watertight protection is greater than ever because the majority of attacks are arbitrary "drive-by shootings on the superhighway", having no specific motive and targeting any system that is vulnerable.
"Organisations can become victims for no reason at all; consequently security is a concern even for companies who feel there is no reason for them to be at risk."
Vorster says in line with a holistic approach, the Enterasys model takes cognisance of point products comprising different silos of information in multi-vendor and multi-device environments, using the intelligence of those systems to identify and then pinpoint the location of a problem.
"Localising the problem and being able to automate a response are key parts of the holistic view of security and can be crucial when there are thousands of users on a network," says Vorster.
Localisation means being able to maintain essential services and quarantine individual users off the network until their patch level or security level is acceptable, he explains.
Kris Budnik, a risk management expert for Deloitte, agrees that being able to isolate users or devices from the network is extremely valuable and should be an important consideration when choosing network architectures.
Budnik and Vorster say mobile computing is a significant risk to the network that can be reduced by having the capability to zone off user machines that are a threat. "Organisations need to have a process in place to be able to quarantine threats automatically," says Budnik.
"From a reseller point of view, like Duxbury, this provides a differentiator through delivering the skill to identify, localise, automate and customise responses to security threats through flexible scripting, as well as prove effectiveness through built‑in network metrics," says Vorster.
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