When judging websites, analysis doesn’t just occur at the web address or URL. The domain name, paths and objects below it will have their own reputation score. This counters the practice of planting malware on the website of a legitimate and popular business.
And reporting attacks and their outcomes is also quite data intensive. Often hosting the logs has to be done on another server just to manage the reports. Vendors are starting to move the logging in the cloud.
“A number of vendors are starting to see that as a point of difference,” says Scott Robertson, Watchguard’s Australian managing director. “It’s something that we’ve looked at
as an option to lessen the cost to the customer by providing it as a service in the cloud.”
If cloud-based reputational services are so important in providing crucial doses of security, is there any disadvantage to using security-as-a-service instead of an on-premises appliance?
“Not really,” says Sean Duca, enterprise solutions architect at McAfee Australia and New Zealand. He says more than 40 percent of the top-200 ASX-listed companies have been using cloud email filtering for several years.
Small and medium businesses without dedicated IT security staff are well suited to such services. IT managers who want a view of the security posture for a company may want the convenience of having an appliance on premises.
It can be harder to get detailed information from a security service if it was provided by the cloud. There’s also greater scope for tinkering with the settings on an appliance than a cloud service.
Duca says a company generally needs 50 employees to justify buying an appliance over a cloud- based service.
And yet take-up of cloud services is far from across the board. There are some areas where appliances retain a strong advantage. BridgePoint’s Smith says only e-mail and some URL filtering happens in the cloud and often an enterprise will have a security appliance from the same security vendor on premise.
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