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Taking the Services-on-Demand Plung
Rosetta started with one Alert Logic appliance at its Houston headquarters a few years back and has added a second at its Denver site. "The only time the cost goes up is when you add another hardware unit," Rappaport says.
But the biggest driving factor for choosing SaaS, Rappaport says, is there is no need to dedicate personnel to security and threat monitoring, which are full-time jobs.
Qualys CEO Philippe Courtot says the nature of the Web forced the move to security services. As companies opened their lines of electronic communications to work better with partners, suppliers and customers, their networks had to become more porous, so the old tactic of defending the perimeter was no longer applicable.
"People used to do security audits once a year; the rich ones implemented scanners from ISS. But now people realize all these vulnerabilities are not just at the perimeter but inside. They need to understand their network from beginning to end...and it is no longer practical to deploy a management solution that requires you to install it and manage it yourself," Courtot says.
He likens how Qualys combined its service--which watches a customer's network from outside with an appliance ...
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that guards it from the inside--to what Apple did in another realm.
"Apple Computer connected its iTunes service to a device, the iPod and now the iPhone, and completely changed how music is distributed. We connect our service with our appliance to look at your network vulnerabilities. We are bringing security and compliance together," Courtot says.
Qualys is a pioneer, but there were some early competitors like Postini and Alert Logic. A newer player, Veracode, offers an on-demand service to find software vulnerabilities. In the past year there has been a flurry of M&A activity as tech giants and others are buying their way in: Google snapped up Postini; SurfControl bought BlackSpider and was in turn bought by Websense. The security incumbents are also reacting; McAfee is starting its own service and Symantec is promising several service-delivered capabilities.
Courtot maintains that just as Microsoft struggles with the SaaS model because it wants to protect its lucrative on-premises software business, the security giants will not be able to retrofit their wares into a services model.
Those giants would disagree. Symantec has promised to make a set of infrastructure software services available starting with a new backup service that was due late this year.
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