Handling Objections

Brian Haboush, vice president of business development at Intelligent Connections, a Royal Oak, Mich.-based solution provider, talks about ways of getting around negative preconceived notions customers have about NAC technology.

CLARIFY THE SITUATION: There continues to be a lot of confusion in the NAC space, mainly because everyone is coming out with a new solution or morphing their product into the NAC space because of the traction NAC has. Check Point is saying they have NAC, and so is Juniper. And, of course, Cisco has been talking about it for years.

But what constitutes NAC for one vendor doesn't necessarily mean the same for another. This confusion is creating services opportunities for VARs on the front end of the actual sales. Customers are looking for security experts to tell them what NAC actually means, and they need the channel to provide network assessment and architectural review to identify the particular type of NAC solution that will fit into their infrastructure.

ACCESS FOR ALL: Clients are aware that the network is becoming more open as a result of business drivers, and that creates security challenges that are freaking out some customers with their complexity.

The bottom line is: People expect access. Whether it's employees, partners or customers, they expect to have access when at your physical location, and that's driving a lot of NAC implementation. The scary part for many clients is that they don't know what type of infrastructure risks they already have just to run their regular business, and now they're adding all this access to the equation.

Clients generally have a blurry picture of how much risk they face, and they don't know how much they can afford or justify spending to mitigate the risks with NAC. You hear people talk about the ROI of security being difficult to quantify, and right now, there are so many requests for IT resources, so companies have to prioritize their spending.

PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE: We're seeing sales cycles for NAC running longer than they are for firewall and IDS [intrusion detection systems]. This is because NAC involves so many people—networking people, remote-access people, desktop people, server people—and it touches every aspect of the network.

Unfortunately for VARs, because it touches so many parts of the network, customers can easily get into "analysis paralysis" mode where they're evaluating NAC, and that also can slow down their decision to buy. But if you're patient and do the consulting and setup work around NAC, it sets you up nicely for deployment and integration services, and then managed services.