Appliances were long the primary means of serving up security systems and email security gateways. With the vast majority of solutions purchased today being delivered via Cloud or hosted datacenters, many customers may question the utility of maintaining On-Premise hardware for their infrastructure, while many vendors are eagerly awaiting the time where they can end-of-life their older products and get an opportunity to upsell their customers.
We’ve already seen an example of this in how Barracuda emphasized growth in “Cloud Security” when compared to “Legacy On-Premises” customers, and pushing On-Premise customers to buy costly Advanced Threat Protection on renewal. Sophos, a public company out of the United Kingdom and no doubt subject to similar stockholder pressures as many of its peers, seems to be pursuing similar strategies to increase revenue.
ASG/UTM Series Going End-of-Life
With the above in mind, and End-of-Life (EOL) migration for many of Sophos’ ASG/UTM Series Appliances is already in progress, and customers are likely already looking around for alternatives. These systems may have reached their end-of-sale and last renewal dates already, but instances like this often mean that vendors are forcing customers to look for other alternative appliance solutions, even if they are not a core priority for buyers in departments like IT.
Value-add services like security are not always seen to be “mission critical” compared to the systems they serve (like email servers or ERP Systems). Thus, devoting time to finding a vendor that can be trusted to protect a company’s core investments can be more difficult than it should be. Additionally, with the increasing frequency of migrations to Office 365 and other cloud productivity suites, there is even less coherence in the market as security problems and their solutions are shifting, including the broader trend of switches from On-Premise to Cloud solutions playing into that. Under these conditions, how are you supposed to prioritize your security choices?
Finding Your Core Security Challenge
In thinking further about appliances, the problem really is that more businesses need to question the viability of “upgrading to a new box” when the hardware and software that appliances are based on fails to keep pace with the real-time nature of today’s threat landscape. This can also create more inconveniences (updates / hardware refreshes) than what the cloud services of today provide.
In the particular case of email, constantly evolving threats and fraud attempts mean that cloud email security can fulfill and execute processes around malicious URLs, Attachments and more which would otherwise be far more costly to do On-Premise. A great appliance may be able to fulfill this, or provide email encryption services similar to many cloud products, but when the next wave-attack hits, are they still maintained & ready for the next attack?
What is a Useful Appliance Today?
We wouldn’t hesitate to say that there are tangible benefits to appliances for security services. For many years, Vircom’s modusGate and other similar solutions continue to be benchmark appliances that contributed to the industry standard in filtering and email protection. But as times change, along with the infrastructure and feature demands from customers, there now exists a greater variety and flexibility in forms of implementation. In some respects, there are so many options out there that you might be facing “an embarrassment of riches” in making your choice.
In the case of our own products, appliances gave way to On-Premise implementations and Virtual Machines. While there’s nothing like a shiny, brand-new box to generate some excitement around IT departments, these systems could fundamentally limit capacity and responsiveness as new security threats emerge.
While these implementations can allow for very similar functionality, given today’s rapid shift in technology pace of change, the costs of managing such deployments can skyrocket quickly. Ultimately, as feature releases move to parity between On-Premise and Cloud, the time required in deploying & implementing software, support, and infrastructure as an all-in-one service around a product’s core functionality provides a real answer as to why Cloud solutions are so popular today. With the advent of a robust networks on which your business’s email server can be hosted & protected without any noticeable latency – wrapped around the most up-to-date intelligence available from billions of messages filtered daily – the benefits of going Cloud are beginning to outweigh the costs. The question is: are you going to go with an expert cloud provider that you can also trust?
Fundamentally, you know you need security, and security for email in particular, but you need to balance the cost, value and service with a provider you can trust. Long-time players in the industry who aren’t subject to the pressures of public shareholders or private equity firms may be a good choice.
Leave a Comment