We’re excited to spotlight one of our top US-based partners: Align – a market-leading IT services and consulting firm based in New York City since 1986. After working with Align for more than two years now, we can confidently say that they’re one of the best in the business. Read on to learn more about Align and their work with us from Align’s Integrate IT principal and network solutions expert, Scott Mayers.
1) Tell us about Align
Align has been in the infrastructure optimization business for 25 years. Our process, our people and our tools differentiate our approach – ensuring that companies gain the maximum value from our solutions to meet the needs of today and provide the scalability and flexibility for tomorrow’s requirements.
Over the course of Align’s evolution, we’ve developed a suite of powerful infrastructure transparency tools. These tools help us to best serve our clients by providing unparalleled insight into IT dependencies. With this knowledge in hand, organizations can reduce risk when embarking on an IT change event. Align’s subject-matter experts and proven process combine with these tools to help companies yield actionable business intelligence to plan for future change and growth.
With offices in New York, London, Chicago, Toronto and Princeton, Align assists clients of any size, location and industry. Over the years, our group of technology and project management experts has successfully managed some of the most challenging IT projects.
2) What’s an example of an interesting or challenging project?
One example that stands out is when a financial firm faced a security ordeal due to a virus outbreak that brought the company’s Windows-based desktop computers and servers to a halt. Malware began disabling applications, while also making thousands of connections to servers, saturating the network. Align was called upon to help sort out the mess, and pointed them to Cymtec’s Sentry product so that the company could monitor traffic and bandwidth usage more closely in the future, as well as enforce website policies and block malware.
3) What does Align look for when considering distribution partnerships? What makes a good partner?
We constantly strive to offer our clients the highest quality tools and solutions. When reviewing Cymtec’s products, we were impressed by both the technology and their value proposition. However, a good partnership includes much more than a strong product. We selected Cymtec as a partner due to the sound support we received on both sales and engineering issues, which we continue to benefit from.
4) What makes Cymtec’s products a good fit for your customers?
We immediately knew our customers would benefit from the Cymtec promise of branch office network visibility and control, reduced network downtime, protection against internal propagating threats and significantly improved network and application performance. It’s a long list, but none of these capabilities can be overlooked. If one of our clients experiences vulnerabilities or their network shuts down for any amount of time, it could mean the loss of millions of dollars, particularly for the large amount of financial services companies that we have on our roster.
5) How are financial services IT issues different than in other verticals?
For these low-latency, high-transactional clients, security and information management is much more critical. Cymtec’s advanced plug-and-play solutions work seamlessly in the background giving IT managers the peace of mind they need to devote their attention to other areas of their business.
6) We’re seeing growth in distributed networks. Do you agree? What does this mean for the data center?
As companies expand on a global basis, we’ve seen a substantial increase in the utilization of remote, branch and small office locations. The performance of the network is expected to be the same in these small sites, yet it must be delivered with “thinner” connectivity and substantially less infrastructure. Often times, the combination of remote sites and the consolidation/virtualization into the data center of critical applications and data will lead to the network becoming the “lifeline” of the user’s experience. We’re finding that the local or remote data centers and that cloud computing are essentially housing all of the critical data and applications. End-to-end connectivity, delivered reliably and managed efficiently, is critical to ensure a successful end-user experience.
