Security Dealer & Integrator

SEP 2016

Find news and information for the executive corporate security director, CSO, facility manager and assets protection manager on issues of policy, products, incidents, risk management, threat assessments and preparedness.

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48 Security Dealer & Integrator / www.SecurityInfoWatch.com September 2016 takes and doesn't know it. e worst- case situation is when the world (i.e. the company's prospects and custom- ers) finds out before the company does. "For millennia, the marketplace dance between seller and customer... (has) at its nucleus three primary rela- tionship elements: the product, con- trolled by the seller; information about the product, also controlled by the seller; and the buying decision, con- trolled by the customer," Blasingame explains. "en something happened that accomplished what no other event or innovation had been able to do for 10 millennia — the birth of a new Age." In the "Age of the Customer," Blasin- game notes a new paradigm: Prod- ucts and services are still controlled by the seller; the buying decision is still controlled by the customer; however, access to information — including cus- tomer experience — is now controlled by the customer. Blasingame estimates that the roughly 30-year transition from the Age of the Seller to e Age of the Cus- tomer — marked as beginning in 1993 with the arrival of the World Wide Web — will be complete by the year 2025. is means that in less than 10 years, businesses will either have converted their business plans to account for doing business in the age of more cus- tomer control, or they will continue to operate using outdated thinking until the diminishing supply of old-style customers is depleted, and they are le with no business prospects. Get Blasingame's book to under- stand why security industry business model disruptions are not solely caused by disruptive technologies — as is com- monly discussed — but are also due to these larger and more powerful forces on the marketplace. e chart above depicts the magnitude of this change. Mega-Risk No. 1: Sellers Can't Hide Mistakes Seller mistakes and deficiencies are amplified by 21st century customer online communities. is is a grow- ing security industry risk that is more significant than most sellers realize. As Blasingame explains, the growing trend is for prospects and customers to go first to independent online sources of information about a seller and the seller's products, and then use that information to evaluate the seller's own information. A customer can self-qual- ify as a prospect for a seller's offering, without any direct contact with the seller, and then can disqualify the seller also without any direct contact. e negative effects of making mistakes in seller verbal and written information are amplified as described above. is is happening in all indus- tries, including the security industry. When it comes to cloud services, there is a large universe of cloud-savvy IT and business personnel who are knowledgeable about cloud comput- ing, services and offerings. It only takes one individual who is more technically savvy than the seller's own marketing, sales or technical personnel, to identify and shine a spotlight on a seller's dis- qualifying mistakes. e same is true for any negative experience that a cus- tomer has with a seller. is is a particularly important con- sideration for security industry com- panies who are offering, or planning to offer, cloud services. End-users have communities where security-related cloud services are being discussed and evaluated. Security integrators also have such communities. ere have always been risks relat- ing to vendor mistakes and deficien- cies, but Mega-Risk No. 1 has amplified them to such a degree that Mega-Risk No. 2 is a serious consideration. Mega-Risk No. 2: Inadequate Understanding of Advancing Technologies Let's look at how an inadequate under- standing of cloud security — and the cloud itself — affects the security industry's cloud computing arena. Security is one of Microso's key selling points for its Azure brand of cloud services. Microso provides plenty of information about the secu- rity features of Azure, including an overview titled, "10 ings to know about Azure Security" (http://bit.ly/ azure-security-10-things). When you read this overview, it is plain to see that Microso provides security for its own Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings — not for the cloud-service provider's hosted application. e overview's initial paragraph says, "Under the hood, the Microso Azure infrastructure imple- ments a number of technologies and processes to safeguard the environ- ment. is page covers how Microso's Global Foundation Services runs the infrastructure and the security mea- sures they implement." The Cloud Figure 1. The epochal permanent shift in control from seller to customer. Graphic: The Age of the Customer, page 26

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