Users Take Back Managed Security

CHICAGO Supercomm 2004 – Service providers are looking to refine their managed services with specialized security products and management tools that hand more control of the services back to the users.

That was the word here at Supercomm, which coincides with a growing interest in managed services from both service providers and security vendors.

Service providers have already noted a change in how their customers want to manage their security, says Marc Collucio, chief technology officer at service provider Straitshot Communications Inc. His company is testing security products that let users do more of their own configuration of services.

“So much functionality has been taken over by the service providers," he says, "so this lets them give back some of the control" to the customer.

An executive in a mid-tier service provider who asked not to be named, agrees with Collucio. “They kind of want to control their own stuff at the moment. Security threats and the need for privacy are driving that.”One such example is the new version of Quarry Technologies Inc.'s iQCSM product. It now features a Web browser that sits on top of the service management software on the company’s iQ-series family of routers.

According to Quarry, this takes much of the strain off service providers’ support operations by enabling customers to change many of their own security settings via the Web browser. This includes, for example, reconfiguring firewalls and changing security policies.

The good news is that there could be a financial benefit for the service providers. Collucio estimates that letting customers handle some of their security settings directly could reduce the number of support calls that his company receives by as much as 20 percent.

“We feel that it should make our life a lot easier -- we can train some key people in each customer, so that should diminish support calls,” he says.

But Quarry is not the first vendor to come out with such offerings. CoSine Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: COSN) already offers its InGage customer network management software, which also enables service providers’ customers to reconfigure features such as firewalls.However, the Redwood City, Calif.-based CoSine says that, for high-end service providers, reporting tools are actually more in demand than the ability to reconfigure security settings via a Web browser.

Nonetheless, CoSine enhanced the InGage product line earlier this year, improving customers’ ability to access reports on service level agreements (SLAs) and firewalls. The firm also added new data mining applications for service providers.

By focusing on enhancing their product families, companies such as Quarry and CoSine are looking to exploit the growing interest in managed services. Denial-of-service attacks, spam, and viruses may be the stuff of nightmare for data center managers, but they are opening up a whole new world of opportunity for service providers (see Pipe Cleaners).

The recent Light Reading Insider on managed services found that service providers, as the managers of global networks, are well positioned to have the widest understanding of global networking security threats (see Managed Security Services Pipe Up). Service providers like AT&T Corp. (NYSE: T) and Equant (NYSE: ENT; Paris: EQU) also told Light Reading Insider they are seeing solid growth in the managed services market. Equant, for example, expects its MSS revenues to increase to $60 million in 2004 from $37 million in 2002, with an ongoing CAGR of 45 percent.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum0