Managed Security Gets a Makeover

Managed security services originally were an extension of what telecom service providers already were giving their business customers — private IP networks and public Internet access — and for many companies were part of the first foray into adding value to an IP offering.

Those early services most frequently featured managed firewalls and offered protection from denial-of-service attacks, viruses and other known problems, usually at the edge of the network.

By contrast, today's managed services have moved even further up the value chain to deliver protection of corporate data and content, even as that data and content becomes more mobile to meet the needs of the mobile work force. Customer expectations are much higher, both for the level of protection and for obtaining information about that protection. Services also are more sophisticated in how they protect enterprises, and much of that protection takes place within the core of the network, analyzing traffic flows to detect problems before they hit the enterprise.

What customers are expecting is universal threat management, said Doug Howard, chief strategy officer for Perimeter eSecurity, which partners with service providers to offer managed security solutions. Customers want to be able to turn to a service provider for the assessment and provision of the right solution on an outsourced basis, particularly if they are smaller companies, he said.

“These services have matured, and companies that might have been concerned about outsourcing security have seen that those companies who do outsource aren't seeing bad things happen,” Howard said.

“Things like [distributed denial-of-service attack] prevention, intrusion detection and intrusion protection services — those are table stakes today,” said Rob Malan, CEO of Arbor Networks, a security systems company with a wide array of service provider customers. “You have to have those things. The real question is, how do you make your managed security offering look different from everyone else's? We have a lot of customers spending a lot of time trying to figure that out.”

As a result of this activity, the industry is likely to see a wider variety of managed security offerings that are not cookie-cutter in any sense.