Dell-Secureworks, big deal for the cloud? I think not

Well the acquisitions continue in the security world. Dell today announced it was buying Secureworks. While terms were not announced, it was rumored to be an all cash deal and Secureworks was said to have done $120m in revenue last year. That would point to this deal being significant enough where Dell will have to give details sooner than later.

The deal is yet another example of big tech acknowledging that security is important. Intel buys McAfee, HP buys Arcsight (and a whole bunch of others) and the list goes on and on. But some some are saying that this deal is all about SaaS and cloud services. That is where I draw the line.

While many want to give everything a cloud angle, I don’t think that is the case here. In fact Secureworks is actually a Johnny Come Lately to the SaaS market. Traditionally they have made their business with security consulting and managing on premises security appliances from a remote security operations center (SOC). Only recently have they offered some of their services under a SaaS model and interestingly most of those were based on reselling 3rd party offerings.

Another important fact is that Secureworks did not really have a big service provider channel. While they had made rumblings over recent months of entering that market, it was not really a target for them. So cloud providers, both public and private, really never viewed the Secureworks offering as an option.

For these reasons to all of those who claim that somehow this deal is about SaaS and cloud security, I have to say hold on a minute. It is a great deal for the security industry, a greater deal for the MSSP market and probably the best deal for the Secureworks team. But it is not a deal that has much to do with SaaS or the cloud.

BTW, for what it is worth I do think that we are going to see a continuing evolution of the MSSP market. I think over the last few years we have seen managed security move from a security consultant with a beeper to a true outsourced SOC model. Secureworks and others have pioneered this move. I think the next step is that these MSSP offerings move to the cloud.

The idea of almost instant on, automated, muti-tenant offerings via a SaaS model represent the next step in MSSP models. Companies like Alert Logic will serve as enablers of this type of cloud based MSSP. Their cloud offerings today are already “MSSP-able”. Of course these same reasons are what drive the cloud service providers to adopt the SaaS security offerings as well.