Having secure systems is an essential in today's business world. With the threat of trojans, viruses, worms, hackers and more, businesses are under a constant onslaught of attacks and need to keep their most precious commodity – data – protected. But for the small and medium-sized business (SMB) sector, there often isn't enough room in the budget for a full-time IT person who is dedicated to ensuring systems security.

Analysis

That's where Security as a Service (SaaS) comes in. SMBs can reap the benefits of having a dedicated security team without the costs of full-time personnel. A vendor provides the service, saving time and money (beyond salary, money is saved on benefits, training and more). Two new services are aiming to bring the ease of SaaS to more businesses with new security-driven offerings.

Quest is offering a new managed services service that offers an on-site Intellitactics SAFE appliance and remote monitoring and analyzation. With the SAFE device maintained local, you have on-site control, but the burden of monitoring is outsourced to Quest. So, someone is always on the lookout for threats for your company so that they can be mitigated before they become an issue. It also ensure that companies are maintaining the proper capabilities for compliance reporting.

"This is one great decision for the customer. One decision puts two powerful resources to work for them – Quest brings exceptional experience in providing security as a service and they’ve selected the SAFE appliance to do it with," said Michael Cerick, Intellitactics’ vice president of Strategic Alliances.

But Quest and Intellitactics aren't the only ones bringing new SaaS offerings to the marketplace. A group of ex-Googlers have gotten together to create a new company called Dasient. Their first product is an anti-malware solution that debuted on June 16. The cloud-based service harnesses the power of web crawlers and heuristics to find and quarantine malicious code in legit websites before it strikes visitors.

"In the last two years, we've seen a fundamental shift in the way malware is spread," said Dasient co-founder Dr. Neil Daswani. "Hackers are using highly automated and mutable attacks to turn websites into delivery vehicles for malicious software. This is a web problem at its core, and it requires a solution that can function at web speed and web scale. That's exactly what we had in mind when we designed the Dasient WAM service."

Dasient Web Anti-Malware is in beta.

Recommendations

There are many optimal SaaS options for small businesses. Make sure you have a firm grasp on your business needs in order to discern which company is the best choice for you. Focus has a lot of research material available about the topic of IT security, so do your background research before you select a vendor.