Understanding the technology options in today’s world is mind-boggling, to say the least. Everyone has their opinions, their products, their solutions and their mindset that they have the best thing since sliced bread.
If you have been around long enough, you know that you cannot believe everything that you hear. But what and who can you believe? In most cases, you rely on the relationships that you have built and the companies that seem to really care… care about you (not just your money) and care enough to be honest about their product/solution and how it stacks up to the competition.
I was delighted last week when I asked one of our vendors a question about a new product and was told that “we shouldn’t change from our current product because theirs wasn’t yet as capable”. This is very rare these days as everyone wants to sell something. Most will avoid dissing their product, even if it qualifies for criticism. This vendor is currently ranked as best-in-class on their flagship products, so I expect the product to be awesome when it is complete. The vendor sometimes tells us things we don’t want to hear but they are upfront and honest, saving us time and ultimately providing quality products and service, usually above expectations. This honesty helps to cement our past and future Partnership.
Our team spends hours and hours researching different technologies to be sure our customers are getting the best value. Many times, after spending those hours, we find “it” is a lesser technology than what we are already offering, even though the marketing seemed to indicate otherwise, the salesman was polished, and the solution sounded great. A lot can change in this industry week-to-week and month-to-month. New products must be thoroughly evaluated, learned and tested because, what might sound enticing from a salesperson or even references, may, in fact, have serious flaws and misgivings that just don’t meet our standards.
Our security vendor wanted to update our team on their EDR capability, e-mail encryption and e-mail filtering products. What is EDR? Endpoint detection and response is an emerging technology that addresses the need for continuous monitoring and response to advanced threats or arguably a form of advanced threat protection. Our vendor thinks they have already gone beyond the emerging EDR and represents his EDR as Event Discovery and Remediation, due to the fact that it also works for servers AND fixes the issue. Where we found the EDR product to be complete and ready for some of our customers, the other products needed to be enhanced prior to our testing and customer recommendations.
Some will say that you will require a multitude of products for a totally secure network. Probably so… but while no security vendor may have the total all-in-one box solution, our vendor is providing solid tools and protection for our customers while providing honest answers. A few other companies that trust this vendor’s solution include: Pixar, Under Armor, Northrop Grumman, Xerox, Ford, Avis, and Toshiba…
