ITAA Urges Lawmakers To Spend On Cyber Security

"Information technology solutions must be built from the hardware platform to the most customized turnkey features with information security in mind," Harris N. Miller, president of the Arlington-based Information Technology Association of America (www.itaa.org), said in a recent interview with VARBusiness magazine. "Value added resellers may be assuming security features to differentiate their products and services and safeguard essential customer applications. For this to happen, we need a much deeper pool of appropriately educated information security specialists ,as well as government funded research and development." Miller, whose organization represents more than 400 corporate members throughout the U.S., indicated that a security breach such as the recent 'Slammer' worm would have been disastrous had it impacted government emergency/law enforcement systems. If the funding is put in place, resellers who offer 'total solution' integrated packages will be in the best position, given the reduction they offer in deployment and maintenance needs, says David K. Black, senior manager of security technologies at Accenture, the Bermuda-based consulting/technology services company.

"Cyber security funds used to mitigate a terrorist threat are most likely benefit vendors and resellers who provide identification and credential verification services and data aggregators ,as well as those that create sophisticated analytics software for analyzing databases and weighing the results," Black says. "In securing government agencies from cyber attacks, vendors who will profit are those that make intrusion detection, system monitoring tools, and authentication hardware and software."

Resellers are in agreement that the funding initiative is well overdue. "The federal government's new focus on cybersecurity has finally brought attention and energy on an area that's been overlooked and underfunded for far too long," says Glenn Ricart, technology officer at CenterBeam, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based reseller with customers in the federal government. "While it's a shame that it's taken events of such tragic proportion to help the federal government to better understand the consequences of poor security management, it's heartening that this is finally being addressed. Good security is good policy, no matter what the political climate is." Still, some resellers stand to gain more quickly than others. "While the majority of the new funding would go to large IT companies, I do believe in 'trickle down economics,' so eventually, we will see some of that," says Tim Carney, president of Network Guys (www.networkguys.com), a Fremont, Calif.-based reseller that provides firewalls, anti-virus/anti-vandal systems and other security solutions to federal customers. "At NetworkGuys, we increasingly see customers hiring security auditors, who make sure the customer's systems conform to appropriate security measures. Their job is to determine what security infrastructure the company currently has and what it needs for compliance. So there is tremendous, pent-up demand." In fact, Carney projects that industry will see security spending for the second quarter 2003 will increase at least 10 percent across the board.