ISPs blind to managed security

Australian ISPs are reluctant to sell security under a managed service arrangement, according to Trend Micro’s consumer/SOHO director George Farah.

He believes that about 50 percent of security customers allow their boxed product license to lapse when their subscription ends.

“Consumer’s don’t want to go to the trouble of renewing their subscription. That’s why it makes sense for an ISP to provide the subscription because they have that established relationship with a user,” he said.

Under such agreements, ISPs could offer security products via a software-as-a-service (Saas) agreement to their existing customers for a nominal fee.

This inability to see how SaaS can bring in residual dollars also comes down to a lack of education, according to telecommunications analyst Paul Budde.

“Local ISPs are not educated well enough about such services. At the moment ISPs are dealing with a lot of issues surrounding the sector and are more concerned about getting themselves up and running.”

Daryl Knight, national sales manager at Internode said in the current market, their customers can go and get security from vendors online.

“We don’t see much value in providing such a service and overall we have invested in mail cluster and spam and virus filtering for our customers,” he said. “We have not been approached by any vendor to offer such a service either,” he said.

In the US, anti-virus vendors are establishing relationships with ISPs to provide security products under a SaaS arrangement, said Patrik Bihammer, analyst, security solutions and system management software, IDC.

“However these same vendors have a bigger challenge here because ISP’s are reluctant to sign on exclusive relationships,” said Bihammer. “ISPs can’t see how dealing with only one vendor will grow their business.”