Google and Proofpoint weigh in on the ‘cloud computing’ debate

Email security and data loss prevention vendor, Proofpoint, recently conducted a survey to gauge the attitude of enterprise customers toward ‘cloud computing’. According to the report, 65 percent of end-user organisations prefer an on-premises solution, 13 percent prefer a hosted service and 22 percent prefer a hybrid delivery model.

Gerry Tucker, regional head APAC, Proofpoint said: “Most organisations today prefer to have an on-premise solution largely because they like to have control of the ability to manage and administer it in their own environment.”

He added: “It’s the way organisations have done it traditionally and they’re comfortable with it.”

At a media briefing in Sydney, Schmidt tolled the virtues of ‘cloud computing’ and indicated Google’s commitment to hosted models, particularly following the acquisition of SaaS provider Postini. Tucker claimed the key differentiator of Proofpoint offerings is their flexibility in several markets including enterprise, whereas Google products are more suited to the SMB space.

“It’s important to look at business requirements, figure out the technology available and then finally decide what the deployment model is – whether it’s a SaaS, on premises or hybrid approach where certain components of functionality are internal and others are external,” he said.

Andrew Lockhart, vice president product marketing, Proofpoint noted: “If you look at the Google approach it’s primarily focused on the inbound side of things and the very small enterprise level.”

Lockhart also asserted that Proofpoint’s strength in email security and compliance is driving development of its hybrid offerings in this market.

“Over five or six years we’ve seen a number of vendors in the email security market who have put the deployment method, whether it’s on-premises or out on the cloud, as the main issue. We think that’s the wrong approach, rather the focus should be on what the customer is looking for and whether the solution effective,” he said.

A traditional hosted model has considerable outbound traffic, claimed Tucker. Information leaving an organisation including spam, viruses and confidential data is creating problems for businesses and presents a case in point where a hybrid model would be more effective.

“To prevent [data loss] at the perimeter, that’s where a hybrid model is appropriate. This allows organisations to have a hosted model for inbound, and an on-premises solution on the outbound data loss prevention side, but have it managed in a single environment,” he said.

Speaking more generally about the local market, Tucker predicts that a pure hosted model is going to increasingly lose appeal as more businesses recognise the need for a data loss prevention solution on-site.

“We think there will be a lot of buyers who are going to split what gets done on the cloud and what gets done on-premises, and the notion of pure in the cloud email security becomes less and less true over time,” he said.

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