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 required.

Ryan Sherstobitoff, Chief Corporate Evangelist, Panda Security, www.pandasecurity.com