Always wear your seatbelt on the information superhighway

According to one industry insider, many business executives are still not taking the safety of their business data and infrastructures seriously enough. – except, usually, after it’s already too late.

The results from this year’s Fusepoint Data Confidence Survey, released from Toronto-based Fusepoint Managed Services and Montreal-based Leger Marketing, show that only 48 per cent of Canadian executives feel confident that their personal information is stored securely.

George Kerns, president and CEO at Fusepoint, an outsourced managed IT solution services company, says it usually takes a close encounter before executives will become more serious about beefing up their security practices and solutions.

“When people don’t follow through with proper actions to address their exposures, they’re driving their vehicle down the information highway without wearing their seat belt,” Kerns said. “It’s only after they have a close call, then it sobers them up and they’ll use seat belts from then on. It’s like that too with data security and data confidence.”

While many executives are still not putting the proper security measures in place, Fortinet, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based global multi-threat security systems provider, is working to help shed more light on this issue.

Graham Bushkes, country manager for Fortinet Canada, says Fortinet has three distribution partners that include Alternative Technology, Vancouver-based Foreseeson and, most recently, Tech Data.

“These partnerships let us reach security-focused resellers,” Bushkes said. “By having two niche distributors with their loyal reseller base and by having a broad based distributor, we can now reach a broader customer base and it’s easier for our resellers to purchase from them.”

Fortinet’s unified threat management (UTM) solutions protect data and infrastructures with firewall, VPN, anti-virus, intrusion prevention, Web filtering, anti-spam, anti-spyware and traffic shaping controls, all using just one system.

“Whether it’s a mid-size or large enterprise, all of these companies are looking for consolidation with security to identify more threats,” Bushkes said. “By combining all of our security feature sets into one device, you not only get better security, but you also reduce your total costs when managing this best-of-breed solution.”

For Fortinet’s channel community, Bushkes says these products are ideal since the Fortinet platform is base on the same firmware. He says that way, once partners are trained on one product they’re trained on all of them.

With Fortinet’s recent partnership with Tech Data, Bushkes says Fortinet will leverage Tech Data’s reseller base by working with the ones that focus on vertical markets the company is not strong in today.

“We’re also going to leverage their security resellers so we can grow more in Canada,” he added. “Our channel strategy has always been to sign partners with a strong security focus and who we think can properly support clients. However, we’re not going to go signing up hundreds because we don’t want to dilute the channel. We want to make sure there are enough Fortinet resources to go around to support their efforts.”

Partners enrolled in Fortinet’s partner program are categorized by one of three levels: silver, gold and platinum. Margins are therefore based on the level a partner is in. Bushkes says silver partners can expect 25 point margins, gold will see 30 and platinum can receive up to 35 points.

So far, the vertical markets in which Fortinet is seeing the most traction with their UTM solutions include the government and education sectors, Bushkes says. He adds large enterprises and corporate markets are now just starting to purchase these systems.

However, when it comes down to it, in the words of Kerns, “More people need to take this seriously. If someone knows they haven’t done what they should be doing [with security], then why wouldn’t they go ahead and do the right thing?”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
Staff Writer, Computer Dealer News

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