A recent article on Channel Web, “HP Funds New CDW Effort To Target SMB Accounts” states that HP is going to be funding 110 reps at CDW to target customers under 499 employees. While this is not a managed services play it does get you thinking. Dell is making a large direct play in the SMB, Microsoft just announced their SaaS solution, Symantec is looking to streamline their sales by cutting out the middle man (albeit for enterprise accounts). All of these topics have a lot of reseller screaming… Continue

Network and selling don't mix If you're going to a networking meeting be sure not to bring your sales hat. How do you feel when someone just wants to sell you something? It has been my experience even if you aren't a purchasing manager for your organization when people just want to s… Continue

You have spent all this time securing your physical NOC, but what about your remote workers? If your NOC is where your technicians are supposed to access customer data then can you have remote workers? Of course you can. There are two key components to look at when securing remote workers. 1. Make sure that they ALWAYS access your customers’ networks through your NOC. Don’t let them create direct connections to your customers’ networks. They should create a secure VPN connection to your NOC, th… Continue

Now, that you have secured your network, you will need to document it, track any changes in the network, and monitor access and intrusions. So, create a standard set of documentation for your network environment. You should already be doing this for your customers, so this should be nothing new. One area that is often overlooked here is actually keeping the documents up-to-date when changes are made. So, part of your documentation should be to identify a change management process for updating a… Continue