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When should you re-Evaluate your vendor?
Welcome to the exclusive How to Re-Evaluate Your Network Security Vendors blog series! In this article, we will cover when you should re-evaluate your network security vendor.
The first step in re-evaluating your security vendor is finding the optimal timing for it. In this section we will review several cases, which combined or stand-alone, mark an ideal timing to re-evaluate your security vendor.
Hardware Refresh and Footprint Expansion
By nature, hardware has a tendency to occasionally malfunction or even perish with time and needs to be replaced every now and again. In addition, capacity upgrades, organizations expanding into new locations all mean it’s time to spend incremental budgets on new hardware purchases or look for alternatives.
License Renewals
While the hardware may last for several years, software licenses typically renew annually. If your hardware is mostly depreciated, the main cost is software license renewals, which represent a good opportunity to look into alternatives which may be available at the mere cost of the software license.
M&A and Vendor Consolidation
If your organization is going through M&A you may end up with multiple security vendors in your network. Regardless of M&A, you may be looking at a heterogeneous security environment across multiple business units that can offer a simplification and cost reduction benefit when standardizing on a common solution.
International Expansion
If you are expanding internationally, you need to consider vendor presence and support of that territory. In addition, network security can be affected by connectivity issues across continents. For example, VPN access and even site-to-site mesh established over large distances, are likely to experience latency issues that affect end user experience.
Cloud Datacenter Migration
If you are migrating all part of your infrastructure to the Cloud, you need to integrate the new “datacenter” into your network. This often requires the deployment of new network security solution which may not be available from your current vendor or come at additional cost.
In the next part of this series, we will cover what to consider when evaluating current and future vendors.