2010: At last, the year for Security-as-a-Service?

A new year always means outreach and updates with our reseller partners and some prognostications about the coming year.

Last week, I was in Southern Europe meeting with over 150 independent Resellers in Spain, France, and Italy. These organizations expressed sentiments I’ve heard elsewhere in the world: they want to deliver strong security value to protect their customers.

An area of focus that I heard from many of them is the movement of their customers to “Security-as-a-Service” or SaaS-based models. Several of them are taking the McAfee SaaS offerings, then adding in other security provider systems and their own services. These bundles allow their customers to avoid putting any effort into managing their security. 

McAfee’s approach for many years has been to provide a “reseller portal” to allow each reseller to manage multiple customer environments from a dedicated, consolidated console. This unified view brings advantages of scale and vigilance to the reseller and cost savings, rapid response, and peace of mind to the customer.

Each year for the last several years, we’ve been hearing that “next year SaaS will become the new standard.” The global economic picture and the need for companies to keep up with an ever more complex landscape may actually make this happen in 2010.

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