Cybersecurity as a Commodity: Making Sense of a Myriad of Choices

There's an abundance of noise in the cybersecurity business today. 1200-ish vendors jumping up and down, sending you LinkedIn requests, and spending gobs of money to get your attention.

To wit: I saw some acquisition news last week from a competitor of ours, complete with the hyperbole (which has since been redacted), that no other company could provide backup/restore, network protection, and endpoint security all in one place. Even though they can't actually do that yet.

This particular vendor wants your registration information for absolutely everything and spams my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds all day long with content offers that are two years old. I click on those ads 100% of the time :P

My message to them: Congrats, guys. Welcome to the noisy vendor club.  Here's a picture of what we all look like to our customers.

Cybersecurity has become a commodity. Everyone claims to be different, more fully-featured, more disruptive, machine learning & AI gurus, easy to use, and the list goes on.

All of them are wrong in this approach. With an overload of choices, making a decision on how to protect your work family has become difficult. That's a shame.

Take a look at this TED Talk. It's a presentation from 2011 about choice paralysis, but these words are more true today than ever. The whole thing is interesting, but fast forward to the 6:45 mark if you want to get some sage advice on how to make good choices.

In case you don't have time to watch the whole TED talk, making a solid choice boils down to these four key things: 

1. Eliminate redundant options - this will narrow your choices down significantly.
2. Develop a solid understanding of the choices left on the table. How well do these choices solve your problems? Do your homework.
3. Categorize your choices to further define, narrow down, and prioritize for the future.
4. Make the least difficult decisions first, and save the complex items for when you're down to very few choices.

If you're in the IT function, and wear a lot of hats, we want to help you make the right choice to protect your business from cybercrime.

Here's what we stand for at Avast Business:

• We stand up for the small to midsize enterprises, and strive to protect them from the lurking hackers and cyber attacks. 
• We ask you questions about the problems you're seeking to solve.
• We offer you a product from our portfolio - only if we think it will help your business.
• We help you try it out in a lab to see for yourself.
• We help you deploy, assist with issues, and provide continuous support.
• We believe that any business from 10 to 1000 employees deserves superior protection.
• We don't spend millions of dollars on advertising. We would rather spend our time and money helping your business.

If you want to contact us and get some help making the right choice, we're here for you.