Securing The Perimeter: Keeping Ahead of Would-Be Hackers

VARBusiness recognized this group of vendors in its first annual Tech Innovators Awards, naming Fortinet's FortiGate 60 Antivirus Firewall as the most groundbreaking product, just ahead of PGP's Universal secure e-mail appliance and Computer Associates' eTrust Secure Content Manager. The vendors all shared the characteristic of taking fresh looks at old problems and offering new ways to solve them.

Fortinet is a perfect example. Firewalls are almost as old as networks themselves, and the company's FortiGate 60 demonstrates that the old technology still has room for a new wrinkle or two for partners. One such partner is Tahas Technologies, a New York-based consulting and services firm.

Tahas caters to customers of various sizes across numerous verticals, always making its reselling decisions based on price and performance, a practice that over time thrust Fortinet into the spotlight.

"We're a very technology-driven organization; we make our decisions primarily on technical functionality and customer satisfaction," says AnnMarie Santamarina, director of business development at Tahas.

The company deployed firewalls for its small and midsize business (SMB) clients from two different vendors before the FortiGate 60 eventually rose to the top in a sort of technological process of natural selection.

"We also used to resell NetScreen firewalls, but we found that they didn't have the same bang for the buck," she says. "We carried both products for about six months, but found that we kept replacing NetScreen with Fortinet."

Among the features that set FortiGate 60 apart is its ability to run two Internet connections at once.

"It's different from the other products within the line because the two Internet connections enable us to provide affordable redundancy," Santamarina says.

If the product comes up short on anything, she says, it's a lack of antispam functionality, a feature FortiGate 60 is developing for release, perhaps as early as next quarter.

Myriad Options
After Sept. 11, 2001, many people in the tech industry thought security revenue would just come rolling in. What they found, instead, was that a huge number of customers--leery of security holes but downright terrified of where the economy might be headed--simply weren't allocating much new money to security.

"There was a big slump in 2002, when a lot of people were delaying security purchases," says Gary Cannon, president of Advanced Internet Security, a security solution provider in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Now that the economy is a little more stable and, more important, because of numerous headline-grabbing virus and worm scares, vendors and VARs finally are seeing customers embrace the concept that a comprehensive security plan is crucial.

"We're now seeing more sales and an increased emphasis on security as companies make it a bigger percentage of their budgets," Cannon adds.

Merrill Lynch analyst Ed Maguire agrees that security is on top of customers' priority lists, but says the jury is still out on security spending. "The budget increases haven't completely fallen into line," he adds.

Either way, the security industry--more so than most other sectors--lends itself to nontechnical innovations in how VARs resell and deploy solutions. Because networks are unique, there's no one right way to make everyone secure. The most innovative products tend to be the ones that give VARs the greatest opportunities to combine them with other products or layer services on top.

The challenge for VARs is explaining security to customers in a way that keeps revenue rolling in. That's easier said than done, because two customers might look almost identical on paper but could have completely different needs.

Pete Lindstrom, research director at industry analyst firm Spire Security, outlined a typical problem at this year's RSA security conference in San Francisco.

"When you encrypt too much, it slows performance, but companies' reaction to news of a breach is they want to be able to detect the bad guys," he told the audience. "Eventually the pendulum settles back into the middle, but we still aren't sure what mix works."

Santamarina says Tahas sells customers on the idea that regardless of which configuration they choose, they need to choose something.

"We've had customers in the past who didn't want to make the investment, but they're now realizing that it really is a necessary part of doing business," she says. "SMBs are starting to realize that they have to pay attention to security now that it has become part of their daily administrative functions."

And for those customers that still need prodding, Santamarina says she has plenty of war stories to share with them.

"It's a little bit easier when it's already all over the media, and even if you weren't affected by an attack, you probably know someone who was," she says. "We probably don't want to be in business with the resistant people anyway, because that's a sign that they don't really understand technology."