How can you be sure of the identity of the person at the other end of the wire ? Trust no one but still get business done is the mantra of the day !

Blog 1 of this 3-part series covered some of the key drivers for why Security SaaS.

Today, I’ll focus on where and how service providers (SPs) place security controls so they can best leverage existing investments as well as easily scale and extend value-added services to customers via the cloud.

SPs typically store their customers’ data in a shared public cloud environment, specifically data centers spanning multiple locations for faster availability and data recovery. Because this data is often business critical, customers are understandably concerned about security and privacy. Wouldn’t it be ideal if they could get both security and storage services from the same cloud environment?

That’s where a cloud-based security SaaS solution comes in. Rather than deploying hardware-based security on their own premise, customers can benefit from a managed hosting cloud provider that offers a software-based security approach that’s more flexible, scalable, and easier to maintain and upgrade as new features and advanced threat protections become available. And one better would be an SP that offers a purpose-built security solution, meaning it’s been specifically designed to protect virtualized data centers and clouds.

How might this work? At minimum, the SP must ensure isolation of each customer’s data and associated security policies so that traffic does not get intermingled. From a deployment perspective, the SP could configure, say, one “security VM” instance per customer that is associated with that customer’s cloud-hosted data. From an administrative standpoint, the SP can either manage security policies for customers via a central management console or provide controlled access (e.g., through a customized Web portal) so customers can configure and manage their own policies, based on their unique business requirements. Either way, SPs and their customers alike can benefit from the cost-effective, highly scalable Security SaaS model. 

To learn more, stay tuned for part 3, where I’ll talk more about the importance of isolating customer data in the public cloud, as well as potential solutions for doing so.