How to survive selling security

And while security as a service will change the market, it won’t spell the end for security resellers who are savvy enough to modify 

their business models. BridgePoint Technology business development director Tim Smith says such services haven’t had an impact on his business, “but it will do”. He says most cloud services focus on mature areas such as anti-virus which is already subscription based.

Even so, often there will be an on- premise component around which the reseller can wrap services.

“The key is embedding ourselves somewhere in that link between the customer and the provider. We need to be showing our value in different areas, (such as) integrating multiple vendors and providing those to our clients. That’s the business model that’s evolving as the industry evolves,” Smith says.

Security-service integration is not a simple proposition, however. Most services tend to be proprietary; the vendors publish interfaces for their software that gives integrators the opportunity to create brokerage services. “It’s a bit Wild West at the moment,” Smith says.

A finger in the cloud

Nearly every security appliance is billed as “cloud- enhanced”. The first action taken by dedicated mail security appliances is to check the reputation of the source e-mail address on the vendor’s database. Many security vendors have built reputation services that draw intelligence from a global network of threat sensors, including the field of the vendor’s installed appliances. The reputation service calculates the quality of a website or an email sender’s reputation based on the sum of the appliances’ experiences with the source.