SMBNation Keynote Day 2 – TrendMicro

Dal and TJ from Trendmicro have the unenviable task of kicking off the day this morning with the keynote at 8am. This is after a couple of massive parties last night which I understand finished with an open bar sponsored by bandwidth.com. I m sure that there would be MANY sore heads this morning. Myself I was out of there by midnight and heading to bed. I ve gotten a pretty sore throat over the last few days as I m coming down with a cold or something the upside is that it sounds like I ve been partying hard, so I m tempted not to tell anyone as they think I m a legend of a party animal. Anyway back on to the presentation.

Dal made the point that what you need to look for in a security partner are things that help you achieve the Trusted Advisor role with your customers. He explained that everything Trend do with their SMB products is designed to help improve our lives as consultants. They consider every single feature addition from the perspective of What value will it add to the reseller , and What task will it make easier for the reseller to secure the customers network . All VERY excellent points.

TJ is now moving on to the cost of things in our industry. Did you know that for $50 you can BUY a bank account? Or for $100 / day you can conduct a distributed denial of service against a competitors website? These are the realities of the world we live in and to be honest it s just plain scarey. I was just talking to Rob Crane who is over here to present on Sharepoint Services and we both expressed the thought of We don t have a chance . That s not to say that we can NOT secure our customers, but it s an expression of the fact that th ebad guys are getting smarter and it s cheaper for them to do the bad stuff that they do. The threat landscape is changing and we as Trusted Advisors to the client need to be able to clearly respond accordingly. Security to me is not just any one product or procedure, it s like an onion with many layers and involves the most important layer being the end user.

Dal has also announce that from October 15th, Trend will release a beta for their HOSTED version of WFBS this will allow small sites without a server to have the same power and control over their Antivirus solutions as you would with the full features inhouse solution.