Email security in the cloud

Grazed from ChannelPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to a recent SpamTitan poll of 2,500 SMB customers worldwide, 50 percent said they expect to leverage cloud computing for cost savings while 44 percent confirmed plans were already in place to move key applications such as email filtering and storage to the cloud. The results of this poll are in strong contrast to previous polls when the majority of SMBs declared themselves to be suspicious and undecided about the respective merits of hosted applications.

Why? It is evident to small and medium-sized businesses that benefits exist when choosing cloud as a deployment option: reduced infrastructure costs, pay-as-you-go services, greater flexibility and significantly reducd IT costs and time. According to Dirk Robinson, Robinson Distribution, South Africa: “Security solutions like spam and web filtering are perfect for cloud deployment because they free-up in-house resources from responsibility for net-borne threats in a way that maximises flexibility and cost savings.”…

For VARs and channel partners with close customer relationships, the bright light of potential opportunity should be visible on their horizon: the opportunity to meet this demand for cloud-based security services in the SMB market. Cloud-based security is not new and some types are more suitable to cloud deployment than others. Resellers have been delivering managed security and services for years; we now generally call these cloud solutions.

One of the most successful and most suitable areas for cloud deployment is hosted email security. “Cloud email security can be a good thing for small businesses. It makes things cheaper, more secure and more efficient. Small companies are generally hesitant when it comes to the cloud, but they often don’t always have the resources to run good security in house – tending to see it as overhead, we are finding the cloud offers a great alternative,” comments James Norris of UK IT distributor, Avosec.

Cloud-based email security is particularly useful to small businesses who don’t want the associated costs or administrative burden of maintaining an in house email gateway solution. A company no longer needs to invest heavily in hardware and software to get the IT services they require to deliver growth. Another significant advantage of cloud based security is the reliability that a large-scale datacentre brings.

For the channel the opportunities are immense: as well as attracting new customers with cloud-based security solutions, resellers also have the opportunity to become a trusted guide in transitioning existing customers from a traditional in house security system to the cloud. With the help of a channel partner the transition is easy. Our partners are seeing more and more companies, particularly those with multiple sites and a mobile workforce or less than up-to-date on-premise server hardware, making the switch because they can see the advantages for them.

Offering strong cloud security solutions can help channel partners to differentiate themselves. “We are seeing SMB customer adoption of cloud computing rising strongly with cost savings and flexibility among the key motivators,” says Mike Mena at BCNS. “Virtualisation is the underlying technology driving applications from costly infrastructure models to the cloud.”

The appeal of private cloud stems from the fact that control remains with the SMB in that they fully manage the solution even though it resides in the cloud, the control is as if the solution were on-premise. This is much more suited to SMB culture. Of course security and privacy still need to be designed into the private cloud in a systemic way. Ease-of-use is equally important. Users should be able to allocate storage, processing or other resources without having to contact someone in IT. As transitioning to cloud for email and web security sweeps the IT world, the channel is uniquely poised to capitalise – if it knows where to look.