The Wolf's At The Door

Jeb Carter, President, DefenderSoft
Midmarket-geared DefenderSoft Inc. is continually looking for affordable, scalable solutions that can be brought downmarket, says Jeb Carter, president of DefenderSoft. If there's one thing Carter is going to put increased emphasis on in 2009, it's "being able to use solutions that have historically been reserved for the enterprise and bringing them to the midmarket."

"There's a certain amount of fret [in the industry]. 'I wish I could see what my friends see.' It's the equivalent of 'having the latest gadget'--trying to help eliminate what they don't know could kill them or take them down. That's what we want to cure."

Ken Phelan, CTO, Gotham Technology Group
Ken Phelan of Gotham Technology Group Inc. says that his security approach in 2009 will include finding new ways to work within customers' ever-shrinking IT budgets. In addition, there will be continued emphasis on the services component of his business, he said, as more customers gravitate toward managed security services in order to cut costs and get the biggest bang for their buck.

"In terms of approaching the customer, obviously we're trying to get more in the rebudgeting process and really prioritize. We're working more within the budget process and kind of expect that there's going to be a lot of issues over capital expenses."

Bill Calderwood, President, The Root Group
As threats become more sophisticated, so do the solutions. Bill Calderwood, president of The Root Group Inc., said that his company is putting an increased focus on innovative solutions for the Web 2.0 threat, in particular, realtime communications and peer-to-peer applications.

"That capability is going to become more important for corporations to allow. That's kind of an area that we're looking at. How does it help your business and how do you make sure it's a safe tool for your business? We put more emphasis on the application layer. That layer of technology is becoming more and more viable and more prevalent and more in demand in the end-user communities."

David Sockol, President, Emagined Security
David Sockol says that he has started to see more customers invest in data protection solutions to protect networks from increasingly sophisticated threats. Consequently, Emagined is putting more of an emphasis on data loss prevention solutions in the upcoming year.

"We're starting to see a lot of companies focus heavily on a list-based approach. Instead of trying to mitigate all of the risks, they're trying to mitigate just the most important ones. There's an uptick in the number of penetration tests being requested, and we'll be moving into that next year. We're starting to see a lot more folks talking about what projects they should or should not do based upon the funds that are allocated toward security projects."

Leo Bletnitsky, President, Desktop Valet
Leo Bletnitsky said that Desktop Valet works hard just to keep his customers maintaining best security practices, such as updating antivirus software. As a result, in 2009 Desktop Valet will put increased emphasis on automation and enhancement of its managed services component so they don't have to rely on customers doing it themselves, he said.

"We're establishing policies and oftentimes people are so busy that they just don't care. Even the business owner, or executive management, they don't seem to care. We're trying to take it out of the clients' hands and keep everybody that we're working with on managed services so that we have more control. So we really don't have to rely too much on the end users or management of those end-user companies. It's going to be as much automation as possible."