Managed security services help to deploy sales staff sensibly

Once we decided to pursue this route, the main benefit was that we spent significantly less time asking customers the same question every year: "Can we make you an offer for what you already have? Are you still protected?" We wanted to move away from this routine and redirect our sales resources to more strategic areas. This shift allowed us to eliminate this repetitive process and focus on meeting customer expectations with comprehensive solutions rather than merely selling products.

Our offerings include classic IT components such as servers, storage systems, network equipment, workstation systems, software, Microsoft 365, and cloud telephony. As a company, we position ourselves as architects of IT solutions, providing either targeted support in specific areas or comprehensive 360-degree service to our clients.

In the realm of security services, we offer a range of solutions including firewall systems, endpoint protection, antivirus and behavior-based security, hard disk encryption, and email security. However, we maintain a low profile regarding data protection consulting, as we do not have data protection officers on staff.

The idea was to use a term that is as German as possible, rather than the broadly interpreted 'managed' term. We have adjusted our understanding of what constitutes basic protection several times. While we still offer our managed products, we are currently revising our approach as IT is continually evolving.

There have also been cases of ransomware among existing customers who are not yet at the level of protection that we recommend today. And there was a relatively well-known case in Kaiserslautern, which was also reported in the press, and they are also relatively open about the issue. Irrespective of the reporting obligation, the company also spoke openly about this at an event we held a few weeks ago. We held an event in our 2nd division stadium with other IT-related companies from the region on the topic of IT security. And the company gave a specialist presentation along the lines of: We were affected, how did we get out of the mess and how do we protect ourselves today?

In principle, a simpler level of protection was previously used. If you look at virus protection or firewall systems, traditional small and medium-sized companies often do not have an IT department that takes care of them 24/7 and also acts to detect resourceful attackers. This simply requires other solutions, other managed services. And that was also the approach taken by the customer after the issues had been resolved.

Ultimately, there is a lot to do to further develop the topics that we started early on. Namely, to keep checking to what extent we can automate regular activities. And that doesn't just refer to technical or service issues, but also to the billing of managed services, because there are often manual processes due to the system. There are more elegant solutions than Excel files, also because every interim solution is a source of error.