Inflated expectations in the security cloud
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, Business, Data Protection, Blog, Security on
I don’t think that anyone with an eye on the future could seriously dismiss ‘the cloud’ as not being right up there as far as game-changing business technologies go. However, that doesn’t mean that the services are not suffering at the hands of over-exposure and hype right now.
IT powerhouses have, it would seem, been happy to jump aboard the cloud hype bandwagon in what some have described as being an all puff and no trousers move.
While I would not dream of suggesting for one moment that cloud-based security services do not have the potential to be really important players as far as the next few years are concerned, I would have to agree with the Gartner overview that they have yet to deliver on customer expectation. I’m thinking in terms of delivering managed firewalls to the enterprise, distributed denial of service protection services and antivirus for example.
According to the latest Security Related Hype Cycles report, in the cloud security services have hit an inflated expectations peak this year. Ray Wagner, a Managing VP at Gartner, explains that in the cloud security services made the top of the list courtesy of a combination of limited successful implementations coupled with unrealistic expectations. “Cloud security providers must deliver on customer expectations for the effectiveness, scalability and cost savings of performing security filtering in the cloud or as a service” Wagner says, concluding that “the small or midsize business is an appealing initial market for these delivery models at lower price points, and we expect that the technology will become mainstream within two to five years”.
Why should anyone care about whether cloud security is on this list? Well, looking back it would appear that those technologies that do rise to a ‘peak of inflated expectations’ level on the hype cycle list tend to pretty soon end up reaching a tipping point whereby they are left on the wrong side of that hype peak, and users are left disillusioned with the technology.
In other words, maybe it is time to stop with all the ‘next big thing’ hyperbole from the cloud service providers and instead time to start giving the technology a chance to talk for itself. Do that and corporate users might just discover that there actually is something to be said for consolidating premises-based security into a cloud-based delivery model after all. Surely the cloud has, by now, gone past the ‘too early in the development cycle to be worth evaluating’ stage even if it has not, at least when we are talking security services, reached a stage of maturity where it can be said to be capable of delivering competitive advantage.
As my late father used to say “don’t jump in with both feet unless you’ve measured the water depth first” and, as usual, he wasn’t wrong.
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Comment by - October 9, 2009 on 7:53 am
i like
Comment by - November 4, 2009 on 10:11 am
Thanks for the post.
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