Adam Hils

Remember those old peanut butter cup commercials from the 1970’s? In security-land, vendors are beginning to combine their chocolate and peanut butter into combined product/SaaS offerings. A spate of acquisitions, including Barracuda’s recent Purewire purchase, and  yesterday’s announced Cisco’s ScanSafe takeout, signal that SaaS offerings are becoming a mainstream SMB delivery mode for certain security controls, and that traditional product vendors understand the need to jumpstart their security as a service portfolios and (hopefully for them) combine two great tastes that taste great together.

I’ve published a Q&A note  (for Gartner customers) about what this means for multifunction firewalls and the SMB customers who love them.  In it we answer the following questions:

• When does it make sense to consider a hybrid security-as-a-service and premises-based solution?
• When building an RFP for an SMB mixed-mode multifunction firewall (UTM), what factors must be considered?

We expect single-vendor multi-mode solutions to come online relatively soon, and offer the following Strategic Planning Assumption:

• By year-end 2012, 20% of new SMB multifunction firewall deployments will include email or Web security-as-a-service.

Vendors are mixing their peanut butter and chocolate because customers anticipate yumminess. Vendors must build in easy-to-manage, seamless goodness, and customers must insist that the finished product mixes well at a low cost and satisfies their appetites without making their IT environments undigestible, security budgets bloated, protection postures slouchy, and users nauseous. Otherwise, rueful network security pros will recall this advertisement .