Smaller businesses are badly served by security vendors

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There is an “inherent complexity” among enterprise class security products that is at variance with the needs of smaller businesses.

Thus argues Tsailing Merrem, senior product marketing manager with security vendor Sophos.

“It’s no secret in the IT security community that small to medium businesses (SMB) are poorly served by the industry’s flagship vendors and products,” said Merrem. “The big companies that dominate the market design their offerings for enterprise customers with well-staffed IT organisations and dedicated security teams.”

One implication of this trend is that smaller companies tend to have lax, or poorly implemented security, making them more vulnerable to growing breadth and incidence of security threats. Sophos cites research by the Ponemon Institute that confirmed from a survey of IT managers in SMBs, that there is “less rigorous security at smaller firms”.

However, rather than lead a charge for a redesign of the current crop of ill-fitting solutions, Merrem advocates a leap forward toward the use of “cloud-based, cloud-managed security-as-a-service”.

There are a number of benefits in cloud-based services, argues Merrem, for smaller businesses that do not have dedicated IT security staff, but by the same token, also do not have enterprise requirements.

Merrem asserts that capabilities such as unified security management, user-centric management, reporting and licensing and pre-configured settings, allow smaller businesses to better adapt the services to their needs, while achieving the highest levels of protection.

There are other important benefits too, such as built-in web security filtering, coordinated web content filtering policies, while offering fast deployment that is to the end user organisation maintenance-free, with no server to set up.

Enterprise grade products that are merely repackaged for smaller businesses not only provide a poor user experience, but argues Merrem, can also be “a recipe for information overload and paralysis”.

For a white paper that fully explores the pitfalls of re-packaged security products, versus cloud-based, endpoint security, click here.

TechCentral Reporters

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