Why Companies Should Invest in Cloud Computing

Ryan Sherstobitoff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:46:00 GMT

Recently I have been getting a number of questions concerning the cost savings of a security-as-a-service (SaaS) model versus a traditional on-premise solution. While there are certainly a number of direct benefits to the end-user (easier to use and upgrades are usually transparent), I thought for the purpose of this article to elaborate on the most important one: “reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) via the outsourcing of security services”.

So what is exactly meant by reducing the total cost of ownership? Well according to industry analysts a good portion of small to medium sized companies out-source their security services to a 3rd party provider. Obviously this strategy has real benefits especially to companies who lack the technical ability to manage and maintain an on-premise anti-malware solution.

As a result, we're seeing a lot of SMBs outsource their desktop anti-malware requirements to a managed service provider and/or adopt a Security-as-a-Service model. This helps reduce complexity and time-to-market when implementing new security technologies and will not require a high degree of skill to maintain the solution.

Because SaaS traditionally hasn’t resided on-premise it takes the overhead of managing and maintaining a complex myriad of technologies and places the responsibility with the provider.

Take for example a small medicare facility with 100 employees; now if we factor in the following variables into the equation we can clearly see the reduction in TCO as a SaaS model eliminates a number of headaches associated with a traditional on-premise model:

* Eliminates the need for additional hardware or resources required for managing and maintaining a SaaS based anti-malware solution.

* Upgrades are usually transparent, thus, the need for dedicating time and resources to upgrade from one version to another is no longer present.

PandaLabs : Cloud computing

Why Companies Should Invest in Cloud Computing