Reining in Security Costs Needs to Be a Higher Priority for More Vendors
While security vendors are quick to play the fear card when it comes to trying to get you to buy their products, one of the issues that terrifies security vendors most is the high cost of security. Instead, vendors like to bandy about terms like "unified threat management," which is basically their way of saying you should dump all your existing security products in favor of their products regardless of the fact that this generally means paying for the same products over again.
In fact, the only two vendors that seem to be trying to create a dialogue about the cost of security are Shavlik and Altiris. For those of you familiar with neither company, Shavlik focuses exclusively on security management software that not only promises to make it easy to manage what you have, but is also easy to install. They accomplish this by pulling data from each client that is then passed back to a centralized database. On top of that database Shavlik runs a policy server that provides a central point of control. On top of that Shavlik also offers tools that eliminate unauthorized applications from any client on the network and another tool that helps companies determine whether they are in compliance with any specific set of regulations.
Altiris, in contrast, is a systems management company that is adding security management to its portfolio. Shavlik has an edge in terms of its security expertise, but for organizations looking to leverage the same IT people across system and security management, Altiris might be the better way to go. Shavlik, on the other hand, plugs into a variety of system management consoles while providing a dedicated security management environment.
For the most part, Shavlik’s customers are confined largely to Fortune 5000 customers, but its solution can play just as well in the SMB space, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to see Shavlik expand its presence in the channel some time down the road through partnerships with companies such as Secure Resolutions. Altiris, on the other hand, has a dedicated following in the SMB space and is gaining fans in the enterprise thanks to partnerships with companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Whatever route IT organizations choose to accomplish the goal of reducing security costs by using tools that reduce the cost of labor and the actual number of products they need to buy, it’s pretty clear this is becoming a hot-button IT issue. The only real question is when are the rest of the vendors in the security market going to figure that out?
