As an IT security reseller, you do much more than take a portfolio of products to your customers. You’re a source of expertise – a trusted advisor who understands the challenges businesses face and the best strategies to overcome them.
When it comes to security, this often means diligently finding the gaps in an organisation’s security posture. While firewalls and anti-virus/malware/ransomware protection are already protecting the perimeter and endpoints, the most successful resellers understand the wider, ever-evolving landscape of threats – and where traditional security is unable to offer any defence.
At Alpha Generation, we’re the trusted advisors to our resellers, just as they’re the trusted advisors to their customers. Thanks to our selection of vendors, we help resellers offer a complete and comprehensive security approach, one that closes the gaps and vulnerabilities that often go unprotected.
Today’s threat landscape is growing ever more diverse. Attackers use a multitude of methods to breach systems, steal data, or simply interrupt day-to-day business processes.
Often, a business identifies a single gap and approaches a reseller for a solution. This could be the risk of:
As a result, there’s undeniable demand for the sort of innovative solutions that our vendors provide. However, closing a single security gap isn’t enough.
When one attack vector is eliminated, attackers turn to another. That’s the cat and mouse game of security, where IT teams find themselves playing catch-up with fast-moving, unpredictable attackers.
That’s why a more comprehensive approach to IT security is so essential for end-users – and such a valuable offering for resellers.
In essence, end-users need to do two things – build their awareness of what is happening across an infrastructure at any given moment, and bolster the protection where the infrastructure is most exposed. Our focus at Alpha Generation is providing a single place for the UK channel to access the vendors that provide those tools.
With a platform like CYBERShark from BlackStratus, even small businesses can get enterprise-grade SIEM, built on BlackStratus’ proven technology. For a small monthly fee, masses of raw data and log files are analysed and turned into real intelligence. So there’s no fog of alerts to block visibility – just clear insights into normal and abnormal network events.
Another major visibility challenge is managing privileged passwords – the powerful administrative accounts across Windows and UNIX systems. These are attackers most coveted targets but, in most organisations, they’re notoriously hard to secure and monitor. To help, Thycotic Secret Server offers highly automated Privileged Account Management, storing all passwords in a secure repository and making access more auditable – even when passwords are shared between multiple administrators.
Beyond passwords and confidential logins, applications themselves can offer a backdoor into a network. The threat of application vulnerabilities continues to grow, but manually patching and applying security updates is a time-consuming, difficult process that becomes a significant drain on resources. Flexera
Corporate Software Inspector makes the process faster and easier, automatically discovering third-party applications, checking for known vulnerabilities, and packaging patches with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and WSUS integration.
Finally, the remaining gap in IT security is one that requires no real point of vulnerability. All the while a company is online, a DDoS attack is a persistent threat – even if there’s no risk of accessing your data or breaching your systems. Corero, leaders in the DDoS mitigation sector, offers the SmartWall Threat Defence System – a suite of appliances to analyse trends and patterns in your traffic, spot the signs of a potential attack, and block malicious traffic before it impacts performance for legitimate users.
In practice, few customers want all their technology at once. Instead, they approach a reseller with a very specific problem or concern, looking for a single solution.
However, the truth is that every business is now a potential target for every type of attack – and resellers need to be complete and comprehensive in their product lines.