(Page 2 of 2)
Some security products make more sense delivered as a service than others, according to John Pescatore, who specializes in security and privacy as a vice president and research fellow at Gartner Research. It makes sense, he says, that most e-mail security products are based in the cloud, since e-mail comes to organizations through the Internet and can be filtered before arriving. Denial-of-service attacks, which involve flooding a computer server with dummy requests that make it impossible for it to respond to legitimate traffic, are also good candidates for cloud-based solutions, Pescatore says. In fact, many companies already rely on Internet-service providers to filter their Web traffic remotely.
Other common security products, such as firewalls, which rely on large amounts of bandwidth, make less sense delivered via the cloud. Products that are heavily tied to internal computer processes, such as authentication and access-control software, also work better on-site, Pescatore says. Furthermore, if a product still requires a customer to install some software, Pescatore doesn't consider it a true security-as-a-service offering.
Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Purewire, an Atlanta-based Web security company, argues that the software-as-a-service approach is especially suited to handling modern Web threats. This, he says, is because users typically use a range of different devices and networks to do business, requiring, he says, "an approach that can always sit between the user and the Web, no matter where the user is."
While the service approach is perceived as a way to save money, Judge says it can offer unique technical advantages too. It's possible to analyze threats better from the cloud than from a single appliance installed for a client. For example, some JavaScript attacks require deeper analysis to be detected, and a single device may not have the necessary processing power. By centralizing the task in the cloud, Judge says, his company is able to use specially designed hardware that enables deeper analysis at a higher speed.
Security technologies make compromising computers hard, but not hard enough.
Microsoft software clones the environment running on a user's machine.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
chrisjmiller
64 Comments
Incompletely baked
Some security services are much better supported in the 'cloud' - email is probably the best example. It's not time critical and is designed to make multiple hops across the Internet. Web filtering could be done the same way, but with the danger of significantly increasing latency, which can be a problem.
If you want to put your (Internet-facing) firewall into the cloud, your ISP should be happy to arrange for this. But designing and amending firewall rules requires input from someone who understands both security *and* your business needs. If you have to retain someone with these skills, it surely makes more sense for them to maintain the firewall themselves.
OTOH there are important security functions that relate to internal traffic and it's very hard to see how these can be handled in the 'cloud'.
Bottom line - like most outsourcing, it only makes long-term sense for organizations that are too small to support the function internally.
Reply