VARs: Storage And Security Come Down To Trust, Cost

The VARs, part of an Everything Channel Virtual Tradeshow discussing security and storing customer data, said without trust between the customer and their VAR and without trust between the VAR and their vendors, a deal could be dead in the water.

"Customers have got to trust us and we've got to trust the customers," said Joseph Ploehn, principal consultant, professional servers for CompuCom, a Dallas, Texas-based solution provider.

While Florinado Gallicchio, risk management practice manager for Melillo Consulting, a Somerset, N.J.-based firm, agreed that trust is a must, oftentimes customers looking to secure and store data have budget restrictions, making cost a deciding factor.

"Money talks," he said, later adding that, "The key to security selling is how much is it going to cost them? If they can get away with not doing that security, even if they're required, they'll do it."

Establishing those relationships is becoming an ever increasing need for VARs, as both the security and storage markets continue to balloon, mainly because of the massive amounts of data that companies amass and the regulations that require them to keep that data locked up and secured, sometimes for up to a decade.

"Information really is the asset our customers are trying to protect," Gallicchio said. "What we're seeing is the protection of storage not just at rest, but in transit."

For David Dadian, CEO and founder of powersolution.com, a Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J.-based solution provider, the marriage between security and storage has remained a growth area for his business, simply because of the amount of data out there and the need to protect it. Other VARs are facing the same challenges.

"The amount of data that has to be stored and secured has grown exponentially," said Ploehn. Ploehn said storage and security solutions topped his best sellers in 2007 and will continue to grow into 2008. "The outlook is bright in both," he said.

And it's regulatory compliance such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley that is driving these monstrous amounts of storage, since regulations require data to be maintained for several years. That amount of storage requires solid security to protect it from getting into the wrong hands.

Dadian said loss of data of any kind can be catastrophic to a company.

"If they lose that data, they're done," he said. "They could be out of business in six months."

But the tremendous growth in the amount of data has also led to a decrease in cost to store it. Dadian said he's seen prices for mass storage arrays drop and the pricing for terabytes of storage shrink. That price reduction is leading to more options for securing the data, he said.

Another hurdle VARs face, however, lies not just in securing data, but managing if for their clients and customers.

"We're seeing a push toward how to efficiently manage data from a cost perspective," Gallicchio said. As companies add more and more disk space, cataloging and accessing data becomes difficult, add increased security costs to that and it can sometimes be prohibitive.

Next: Picking The Right Vendors