The 'hidden' area for resellers to make good margins AND cut client overheads

In the recession, resellers need to present solutions that are going to save money, particularly with enterprise customers who are cutting budgets or struggling to do more with the same budget.

There is one area, which most clients and many resellers are unaware of, which can save enterprises money, with minimum disruption, assist them with compliance, improve their security and help them become more efficient, while making good margins for resellers.

Low TCO and high migration costs continue to drive the retention of enterprise legacy systems in the recession. Replacing insecure, low performance, non compliant FTP (file transfer protocol) in enterprises with SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) is a high value, good margin, opportunity for the channel, overlooked by many and presenting a gap in the market.

FTP, which is widely used on legacy systems, is insecure. It doesn’t support strong authentication or strong encryption and lacks data integrity.

It was introduced in the 70s and security simply isn’t up to the standard required today. It’s not suitable for protecting companies against data leakage, against hacking and criminal activities, and to provide proper internal and external security.

But because of the way usage has evolved, FTP has been under the radar in many organisations. Where companies did upgrade to SSH (secure shell), also known as Secure File Transfer Protocol,  many use version 1, which is free but still contains insecurities.

Compliance is another issue. Users with FTP or SSH1will be unable to meet security compliance requirements in a world where compliance is becoming increasingly important.

FTP performance is poor, especially with ever-increasing file sizes and an ever-increasing number of files to be transferred, resulting in too much server time being taken up and too many valuable staff tied up with file transfer administration - crucial cost considerations in a recession.

Passwords are sent in the clear, and while FTP is bandwidth greedy, it isn’t efficient in the usage of the bandwidth.

Replacing FTP with an efficient SFTP solution will greatly improve security, help enterprises meet compliance security requirements and will at the same provide much improved performance and scalability, together with good management and reporting.

Potential cost savings will come from the improved performance and improved security of SFTP with SSH Version 2. SFTP takes up less server capacity and frees valuable staff from administering file transfer, with consequent cost savings. Additionally, costly security incidents and compliance problems can be avoided with the improved security features. Where multiple legacy systems are present, these savings can be commensurately greater.

Presenting an opportunity for savings, which the customer might not even have thought of and which is connected with the often overlooked legacy infrastructure of the network, will not only provide an opportunity with no competition, but also bolster your reputation as a trusted VAR. 

There are quite a number of STFP solutions available based on SSH2 and deployed. The opportunity is therefore not only restricted to those customers upgrading to SFTP but also in migrating customers who may have a range of inefficient or expensive to maintain SFTP solutions already in use

For example, recent tests (December 2008) by Tolly1 looked at three of the main offerings. 

The products tested were Open Text Connectivity Secure Server 1.0; Attachmate Corp Reflection for Secure IT Server 6.1; and SSH Communications Tectia Server 6.0.

When transferring a 36 Mb file from a server to a requesting client, Open Text completed the task 10x faster than SSH’s Tectia Server and 24 times faster than Attachmate’s Reflection for Secure IT Server.

Open Text was the only product to scale successfully to 1024 sessions. This means it can be deployed on just a single server, saving on hardware costs, space, and associated deployment and ongoing support costs. The report found that users would spend 5,600$ to support 1000 sessions with Open Text, 14,000$ for SSH and 60,000$ for Attachmate. 

All too often the world is full of seemingly good opportunities which either don’t deliver or need a lot of time, training and investment up front. Why should you even consider selling an apparently technically complex solution into a well established, legacy environment?
 
You should for a whole range of reasons:

1.    It’s an easy sell, both sales wise and technically. Users understand the issues and the differentiators are clear – security and ROI are key issues today.
2.    There’s no investment, no need for training, and technical involvement is only required post sale.
3.    Wick Hill and Open Text (previously known as Hummingbird) provide ALL the resource to progress the sale once you have done the initial identification.
4.    This solution is deep in customers’ systems so it develops a good value added relationship.
5.    Payback is typically in months, so it works for the customer.
6.    If customers are replacing existing systems, the reduction in maintenance costs alone can justify it.