Service Providers Prefer SaaS Security over Deployable Security
This week in Secure Cloud Review, in my series on the Service Provider of Tomorrow, I explained why hosting companies and other service providers will continue to adopt SaaS solutions offered by progressive infrastructure software firms. This is the key to a service provider moving “up the stack” – offering higher levels of managed services and driving greater profitability and financial performance.
Security solutions are a prime example, perhaps the best example today and in the near future. And in the security industry, Alert Logic is the only company demonstrating the success of this model.
Alert Logic provides a window into the future of the infrastructure software business, and the future of the hosting business. Ever since landing our first managed hosting partner in 2005, our SaaS security offerings have allowed managed hosting providers to offer standard security products to their customers. As a SaaS offering, we allow hosting providers to avoid capex and maintenance, and avoid the cost and distraction of building teams of specialists to integrate managed security solutions such as intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, and log management.
Since 2005, we have rapidly expanded our channel. Today, more than half of the 30 largest hosting companies in the world have standardized on Alert Logic’s products – Threat Manager and Log Manager – to offer to their customers as add-on services or incorporated into their fully-managed solution stack.
Recently, potential imitators have realized the wisdom of our strategy and have tried to help service providers deploy managed security solutions. For example, LogLogic recently announced their service provider strategy. The problem with LogLogic’s solution, as with other imitators, is they are approaching the service provider market with a deployable solution, not a SaaS solution. This is a key distinction.
In a deployable solution, the service provider must purchase more than just a software product – they have to buy all the infrastructure required to deploy and run a multi-tenant environment in their own data center. And they have to hire a team to manage and support the environment. By delivering via the SaaS model, Alert Logic allows service providers to avoid all this. In fact, SaaS security delivers the same value proposition to hosting companies that hosting companies deliver to their customers.
That’s why the hosting industry has embraced Alert Logic. The hosting industry knows how to eat their own cooking. And they won’t be easily persuaded by imitators.
Posted by Gray Hall
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