Steve Smith (Advantage)
Palmerston North-based IT services provider Advantage has made two new partnerships and a significant hire.
Steve Smith brings twenty years of experience to join the company as regional executive, responsible for developing new business, promoting services and the expansion of Advantage’s data security services for small to medium-size businesses in the Auckland region.
Previously, Smith led a multi-million-dollar outsourcing agreement as head of commercials and governance, after managing IT infrastructure at a fintec company.
He also spent seven years with specialist cybersecurity distributor Chillisoft as director of technical services.
Advantage also announced it was providing new dark web monitoring services through a partnership with ID Agent, which provides monitoring and identity theft protection solutions.
With Dark Web ID, Advantage offers around the clock monitoring and alerting for compromised digital credentials, scouring millions of sources, including botnets, criminal chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, malicious websites, bulletin boards and illegal black market sites.
“We have a number of monitoring tools in our Revelation security information and event management and security operations centre service which are utilised to discover and prevent attacks but were missing the part required to determine past breaches, until now”, said Steve Smith, regional executive at Advantage.
Digital credentials such as usernames and passwords are widely used to connect to critical business applications, said Kevin Lancaster, CEO of ID Agent.
That is why such credentials are among the most valuable assets found on the dark web.
Current solutions were unaffordable for smaller businesses, Lancaster said, but Dark Web ID plugs that gap with an affordable model that provides small businesses with advanced credential monitoring.
The second partnership was with signature management solutions company Exclaimer to bring the Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365, into the Advantage product suite.
Exclaimer developed the software and solutions to design, distribute and control email signatures for business-to-business (B2B) customers.
The service allows Advantage to offer partners an intelligent email signature management solution that is simple-to-use and gives all Office 365 and GSuite users high-quality signatures on any web-enabled device.
It has over 9,000 partners in over 60 countries and over 50 million users worldwide.
Smith said Exclaimer Cloud offers customers additional features that take email signature management to the next level.
“Exclaimer Cloud gives businesses the opportunity to design, control and manage signatures across an entire organisation with ease," he said.
"We are eager to actively begin selling Exclaimer’s cloud-based service to all customers and partners."
Advantages include ensuring full compliance with international disclaimer law and guarantees that a company’s branding and latest marketing messages are included on sent emails.
