Despite some fairly sketchy roads, we had a great turnout at the January AMITPRO meeting. The evening was somewhat of a security doubleheader, and it was great to see a few new faces turning out.

The first presentation was given by Paul Maloney from Technology Management and Consultancy (TMC). Paul discussed the importance of compliance, even in smaller organisations, and went on to compare some well known standards such as ISO27001 and ISO9001 as well as introducing PCI-DSS for companies taking card payments.

The talk then moved onto the topics of Asset Management and Patch Management, with suggestions for policies and processes for keeping track of IT equipment and how to help clients through stressful audits.

Throughout the session there was a lively dialogue between the speaker and the rest of the room, with Paul drawing on his experiences to answer questions posed by members. We’ve already had feedback from attendees saying how impressed they were at Paul’s security knowledge, so I’m sure TMC’s services will be called upon by members in future.

We’d like to thank Paul and Claire from TMC for coming to the group, and for David Ogden for recommending TMC.

Paul’s full slide deck is available for download HERE

Next up was Lee Clark from MXSweep, a relative newcomer in the increasingly competitive world of hosted e-mail security. The product is taking on the likes of MessageLabs (Symantec) directly, and hopes to win by offering a better service to both customers and partners. The pricing of the service is favourable compared to the competition, and is well aligned to the SME market.

Lee delivered an extremely slick presentation which was well received by the group, especially by the SoftScan resellers in the room, some of whom have been disillusioned by the recent Symantec acquisition and subsequent pricing hikes.

The presentation covered the features of MXSweep, the Sales opportunity, reporting and auditing features, and touched on the development roadmap for 2010.

Thanks to Lee for making the journey up to speak to the group, we appreciate the time and effort he put into the presentation.

You can download the slides from Lee’s presentation HERE