Symantec on Wednesday announced its now offering its flagship security and storage applications as a subscription service through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Customers looking to quickly deploy and manage Symantec’s (NASDAQ: SYMC) enterprise-class Endpoint Protection and Veritas Storage Foundation applications can pay an hourly or monthly rate through the EC2 interface rather than installing the security and storage management applications on site.
“It’s significant in the sense that issues of security and information management are top of mind for companies of all sizes right now,” John Magee, Symantec’s vice president of product marketing, told InternetNews.com. “With more and more organizations leveraging Amazon EC2 for their Web sites, customers want to have Symantec protecting those servers and managing those storage servers with the same reliability and security as an on-premise customer.”
Magee said Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) EC2’s leadership position in the cloud computing space made it a natural partner for launching Symantec’s first third-party-hosted, on-demand offering.
“The cloud model is of interest to organizations of all sizes and Amazon is a clear leader in this space,” he said. “We’re seeing people going to the cloud model for deployment to handle spikes in workloads during the holiday season when they need additional processing power or to get an application up quickly rather than waiting for their IT organizations to find the budget and time to do it internally.”
Users can log onto the Amazon EC2 Web site and set up their service parameters based on operating systems, the number of servers needed and the amount of memory and storage they require and add the Symantec Endpoint Protection or Veritas Storage Foundation applications with a credit card.
Because the pay-as-you-go model only charges users for the actual time spent accessing the applications, a typical company or organization might spend between 15 cents and 50 cents an hour to subscribe to the Symantec applications.
Symantec Endpoint Protection includes antivirus, antispyware, firewall and intrusion-detection features. The Veritas Storage Foundation Basic lets users manage multiple hosts from a central interface and optimize storage performance and availability online.
Most important, Magee said, customers subscribing through EC2 can manage their storage parameters without taking any of their applications offline. They can allocate storage for all their applications while those same applications are running in the cloud environment.
Companies—particularly small and midsized businesses—are embracing cloud-based applications rather than pony up the sizeable upfront costs and installation hassles to access best-of-breed business applications of all kinds.
Gartner predicts that the $820 million security-as-a-service market will continue to grow at a compound annual rate of more than 30 percent for the next three years, meaning companies will spend in excess of $3 billion by 2012 for this cloud-based solution to their omnipresent security concerns.
“Gartner clients are showing increased inclination toward deploying security SaaS solutions in threat- and vulnerability-focused markets where up-to-date protection and expertise is paramount,” Gartner analyst Arabella Hallawell said. “Security as a service also offers the potential for lower-cost delivery of security controls and functions with faster implementation cycles.”
