Managed security services hold its promises for every kind of enterprises and never the less with a most cost effective approach. But concerns also are there about its security status. This article attempts to provide you its trends in future likely to be.
Bringing down cost through innovative approaches, have become the foremost tasks for CIO/CTO/CSOs in organizations. One of the biggest challenges facing IT decision-makers today is balancing the cost of security measures against risks that are becoming increasingly sophisticated, common, and devastating. Managed security services (MSS) now accounts multi- billion a year of major service provider’s revenue and business growth is accelerating as IT clients continue to sharpen the focus on security. Experts believe that Managed Security services will be the next major wave, which is expected to lead to rapid growth of MSS bundled into broader service offerings that include consulting as well as long-term services. Clients now have more options to choose from in selecting a managed security service provider with good solution alignment to business strategy and requirements.
Many IT organizations are taking a hard look at what is and is not core to internal IT, assessing their teams and moving people to strategic areas to concentrate on more important projects. Even organizations that traditionally kept services in-house are assessing whether to selectively outsource day-to-day monitoring and management to third parties in order to take advantage of the predictable monthly expense that managed services offer. Security managed services are no exception.
Sixty percent of participants in Nemertes Research's 2009 Spring Benchmark say they're planning to increase their use of managed services in 2009 and beyond, with top drivers being falling budgets, shrinking staffs, a lack of specialized expertise and rising demand to support more complex applications. The increasingly distributed workforce also play a role because managing remote sites poses a particular challenge to IT (which is often highly centralized). In the branch office, this trend has accelerated dramatically. In 2006, 27% of research participants were using some form of managed services. By 2008 that number had more than doubled to 65% and in 2009 60% of participants are expanding their use of managed services.
It’s no secret that MSS/cloud/security-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings have become more attractive with the economic downturn. Most industry experts predicted accelerated MSS uptake in hard economic times, as periodic operational expenses became easier for SMBs to digest than large capital outlays. SMB organizations are more willing than ever to consider outsourcing parts of their security operations, and vendors are scrambling to invest in upgrading/building/acquiring the capabilities necessary to service those customers.
Latest Trend:
As MSPs and businesses prepare for Windows 7’s debut, MSPs are changing the rules of the game. Hosted Desktop solutions are emerging as strong approach for small and medium enterprises. It’s a cloud/SaaS service of sorts that blends Windows, open source, security and productivity applications for a flat monthly fee.
With such initiative, vendors are removing the costly and burdensome tasks of desktop management for small and medium-sized businesses that until now have been beyond their reach. Hosted desktops were once thought to be the domain of large enterprises. But that’s changing with such initiatives – a cheaper, better, faster solution to SMBs’ PC challenges. Small and medium-sized organizations want lower cost computing capabilities, but they don’t want to sacrifice security, performance or reliability. Hosted desktop service meets these requirements and provides a viable alternative to deploying traditional PCs.
Because the data and applications are stored, or "hosted" in the secure data center, employees can access their desktop data and applications from any location using any PC, laptop, thin client or smartphone – as long as they have an Internet connection on their device.
In addition, Hosted desktops offers online provisioning, based on vendor’s proprietary technology, allowing businesses to add and remove users within seconds, compared with hours or days required with other approaches. Furthermore, vendors use their expertise and proprietary technologies to provide stable, predictable Internet performance, which enhances employee productivity by preventing the lag time, or latency, which is typical of other hosted solutions. With this technology, emails and other data are routed via the fastest network based on a proactive, real-time analysis of Internet traffic and bottlenecks.
—By: Tanu Srivastava |
