Recent announcements by Symantec, Quest and Log Logic demonstrate that security software vendors are slowly starting to change their models to cater more to cloud service providers. These vendors still have a long way to go. Changing to subscription pricing, as Symantec and Quest announced this week, and releasing a virtual appliance, as Log Logic announced this month, are movements in the right direction. But these changes aren’t enough to qualify as cloud solutions.
One of the missing ingredients from johnny come lately vendors seeking to cash in on the cloud gold rush is a SaaS delivery model for their security products. It isn’t cloud delivery if it isn’t SaaS. Another missing ingredient is native multi-tenant capability for these security products. And don’t forget open API support for portal integration. Without these key factors, security solutions can’t scale up or down sufficiently to meet service provider requirements, and can’t integrate in a scalable way with service provider operations.
To achieve security for the cloud, or through the cloud, means integrating security software solutions with service provider business models. This goes beyond pricing models and it takes more than delivering a virtual appliance. Security vendors who want to embrace cloud delivery for IT infrastructure solutions need to adopt a model like Alert Logic’s, as described in their most recent blog post.
We expect to see more announcements like these, as software vendors play catch-up to the service provider and cloud trends. So get used to it MSP Mentor … you will see many more groundhog days!
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