Outbreaks such as Shellshock and Heartbleed may look like a business opportunity for the channel, but it actually costs solution providers money, according to a senior executive from Dell/Sonicwall.
Patrick Sweeney, VP of product management at Dell SonicWall, said channel partners are left with little choice but to take care of catastrophic security bugs such as Heartbleed that exploited more than 900 Canadian taxpayers.
“They won’t be profitable when such things happen. Organizations need to have appropriate policies for gateway firewalls that can take care of such things. Also, companies need to know if they have the capabilities to manage problems like Heartbleed when they occur on such a large scale.”
A Dell partner survey reveal top threats to customers:
- 51 per cent of partners reported hearing from their customers that network security and UTM is the leading cause of concern for next year
- Partners pointed to network security and unitfied threat management or UTM (77 per cent of respondents), mobile security (61 per cent), and cloud security (39 per cent) as the top three concerns they are hearing from customers
- When asked about the top two threats of concern to their customers, bring your own device (BYOD) led (59 per cent), followed by compliance (52 per cent) and advanced persistent threats (52 per cent)
The survey also revealed the following issues were important to partners:
- 82 per cent of partners ranked profitability as one of the three most important elements in creating a successful partner program in security
- 50 per cent of partners ranked rebates and special offers as one of three most important elements to creating a partner program in security
- 72 per cent of partners ranked training by vendors
- 63 per cent of partners said it is very important or important that they offer their customers network security, mobile security, and identity and access management from a single vendor
- Only seven per cent of partners said it was not important to offer all security solutions from the same vendor
Sweeney, who took part in the Dell Security Peak Performance Partner Conference in Orlando, Fla., said Dell/SonicWall is providing the channel with new tool sets to handle many of the customer challenges with security bugs.
Dell also plans to augment the channel’s profits by offering a 50 per cent rebate on SonicWall products at the event in Orlando.
“They should be protected when such things come out so they can stay profitable,” he said.”They have to ensure that there is no downtime and also have to take care of other nuances such as managing BYOD. For the channel partners, it’s not just about what happened but more about what I’m protecting you from.”
Dell has brought back the popular Peak Performance channel conference formerly put on by SonicWall. In the past, the Peak Performance conference drew approximately 200 to 300 channel partners from Canada and the U.S.
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Patrick Sweeney, VP of product management at Dell SonicWall told CDN that when Dell acquired SonicWall they did not hold the conference for a couple of years, but decided to bring it back to Orlando because of popular demand. Now called the Dell Security Peak Performance Partner Conference, it is taking place between October 12th and October 15th.
“We’ve received great response from the channel community and have 600 channel partners attending this event. We will have a few main stage presentations but the focus will be on training, product roadmaps and technical sessions. To show Dell’s commitment to security and the channel, Michael Dell will be at the event on Monday,” Sweeney said.