Although organizations have been stealing intellectual property form each other as long as there have been organizations, the speed and scope at which that property can be stolen has business owners on edge.
Companies are spending millions, sometimes billions of dollars, on researching and developing new products, only to see the systems that contain that sensitive being hacked into with impunity. Clearly, this creates an opportunity for solution providers that can deliver a set of security technologies that would help customers secure their intellectual assets.
Unisys wants to help solution providers take advantage of that opportunity by setting up a new channel program around the company’s Stealth Solution for Secure Virtual Terminal (SSVT), a USB-based security solution that not only eliminates all malware on a Windows or Linux machine; it also encrypts all the communications sent over the public Internet.
Originally developed by Unisys for the National Security Agency, the commercial version of the Unisys security offering leverages SecureParser technology developed by Security First Corp. That technology cryptographically splits data into multiple packets before sending that information out across the Internet. Once received, SecureParser then reassembles those packets to create a message that can be read by an authorized user. All anyone hacking into that conversation is ever going to see is a lot of random bits of data.
To expand the market for SSVT Unisys has hired long-time channel veteran Tom Zorn to be the company’s vice president of software channels. Zorn says he’s looking for solution providers that have experience working with technologies such as Radius and Active Directory to help customers implement SSVT. But while experience with those technologies is important, Zorn says that the most important thing is being able to find the individuals within an organization that are most concerned about securing intellectual property. That may not necessarily be the IT organization, but rather someone who is specifically charged with minimizing corporate risk.
Zorn says that Unisys has a long history of working on advanced technologies for the government that it later brings to the commercial market. He expects that should the SSVT program prove successful, the number of those technologies that Unisys will bring to market via the channel will steadily increase.
In the meantime, solution providers looking for higher margin opportunities would do well to start looking past basic anti-virus and firewall opportunities. While demand for those technologies is high, the number of solution providers carrying those product lines is also high, which tends to have a bruising effect on the solution providers competing in that space.
What solution providers in the security space need is the ability to differentiate their services in a way that would then allow them to naturally pick up the anti-virus and firewall business by extension. If you can secure the organization’s crown jewels, chances are pretty high they will trust you to secure the rest of the company’s IT environment. The challenge then becomes finding the simplest most efficient way to actually make that happen.