We’re excited to spotlight a new partner: Coffer Group – an IT consultancy with a strong focus in the financial services industry. Coffer Group is dedicated to providing IT services to small and medium sized companies to help them reduce IT staffing overhead. Coffer Group has just recently signed on as a value added reseller, and we’re thrilled to have them work closely with us.
Read on to learn more about Coffer Group and their work with us from Principal Jason Coffer.
1) Can you give us an overview of Coffer Group?
Coffer Group, headquartered in San Francisco, provides information technology solutions to small and medium business in the San Francisco Bay area, and through partners in Boston and New York. We provide various levels of support to our clients based on their needs—sometimes we act as a company’s entire IT department, while in other companies we work alongside their IT department for special projects and staff augmentation.
Since 2007, our team has provided a variety of services to customers, including managed IT services, IT project management, architecture, design and implementation, business continuity and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning, IT staff recruitment and more.
Additionally, Coffer Group has strong strategic partnerships with other consulting firms to provide subject area expertise and additional project staffing, as necessary, to ensure our customers are receiving the highest level of counsel possible.
2) What markets do you mainly focus on and what services do you offer?
Our primary focus is the financial services market. About 70 percent of clients are venture capitalist, private equity, or hedge fund firms.
Because of our involvement in the financial services industry, we do a lot of work with Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and business continuity. DR is of the utmost importance to financial services firms because they are often legally required to have DR plans in place. If a firm’s IT service is disrupted, it can be very costly for the firm, so it’s increasingly important that networks are always up and business critical functions are able to perform properly.
3) What makes Cymtec’s products a good fit for your customers?
Over a third of Coffer Group’s clients have remote or branch offices. Offering Cymtec Sentry, a product designed for the branch and small office environment, will allow us to better service our clients with multi-office locations and provide network visibility and control offerings.
A firewall provides a locked door to keep intruders out, but an Intrusion Detection Solution (IDS) verifies that no one is actually breaking in (either by picking the lock or going through the back window)—which company management (and investors) like to know. Because of this, many of our customers are looking for an IDS. IDS is typically complex, expensive to manage and require a lot of involvement from IT staff. Cymtec Scout is simple and provides the security our customers need without the hassle of extra staff or resources.
4) Can you tell us about issues your customers face?
Regulatory issues can frequently be a gray area; in addition, recent legislation, such as the Dodd-Frank Act, increases the legal scrutiny these companies are under. We want to make sure our clients are prepared for any regulatory mandates. As legislation is becoming stricter, it becomes even more critical to have the most up-to-date offerings for customers.
Our customers also face bandwidth and optimization issues. Having the network down, or not performing optimally, can lead to loss of productivity and the loss of real dollars. Cymtec’s advanced plug-and-play solutions work seamlessly in the background of financial services firms, giving IT managers’ peace of mind and allowing them to devote time to other aspects of the business.
5) We’re seeing growth in distributed networks. Do you agree? What does this mean?
As companies expand, we have noticed an increase in the utilization of remote workers. The performance of the network is expected to be the same for all workers, yet for remote workers, it must be delivered with “thinner” connectivity and substantially less infrastructure.
The combination of remote sites and the consolidation/virtualization into the data center of critical applications and data have led to the network becoming a critical piece of the user’s experience. We’re finding that the local or remote data centers plus cloud computing are housing most of the critical data and applications. End-to-end connectivity, delivered reliably and managed efficiently, is critical to ensure a successful end- user experience.
