New challenges, new opportunities for collaboration

Hodson: Is the cloud the answer to ever-increasing threat?

The changing face of security threats creates fresh challenges for security vendors and for resellers when advising their customers on what measures to take.

Cloud-based security not only addresses current security risks, but presents an opportunity to strengthen the bond between security companies offering a cloud-based solution, their channel partners, and the end user.

Cyber criminals are becoming more adept at developing myriad variants of malware across different delivery mechanisms. This means pattern files searching for recognised signatures will get much larger, increasing the demands on disk space, memory and processor use at the end point.

Pattern-file deployment will take far longer and will eat up huge amounts of bandwidth. Perhaps most worryingly, even if files still could be deployed, the disruption for the user during the update process would regularly slow machines to a halt.

By 2015, if we continue with the current approach to end point security, the deployment overhead for IT operations in a large enterprise will simply be too much.

A single pattern-file update can take more than five hours to deploy in a company with 250,000 global employees. That is hardly a speedy response to what could be a business-critical threat.

With companies receiving updates up to eight times a day, and many large organisations testing pattern files in a controlled environment before deploying them across the corporate network, keeping up with the updates seems impossible.

Network administrators would spend all their time managing updates, networks would be crippled by the constant updating activity and end point performance would be compromised.

That’s to say nothing of remote or mobile workers who may not even receive the updates until several days after they have been issued.

The answer – and the opportunity for the channel – lies in transferring the burden for storage and detection intelligence to the cloud. This ensures minimal resource use at the end point, consistent traffic flow over the network, the immediate handling of new threats and increased awareness of localised threats.

The approach is a hybrid one. Some threats will still be caught at the gateway through suspect IP addresses or blocked senders, some locally through signature recognition.

For a large enterprise, that will mean keeping a copy of the threat database locally, with latency to the client necessarily kept to a minimum. For all parties, cloud computing offers not just a better form of protection, but one that is far easier to manage.

More than that, it helps resellers easily add real value to their relationship with their customers, as hosted solutions enable resellers to manage their customers’ networks and provide consultation.

They are acting almost like an in-house IT security person without physically being there. This reduces the customer’s management burden, allowing them to focus on growing their business.

With the right vendor support, security in the cloud enables resellers to position themselves as trusted advisers, and boost their services businesses.

Caroline Hodson is channel sales and marketing director at Trend Micro