The 5 Cs of Security as a Service

The 3rd C…Cost  

Moving on through the 5 Cs of Security as a Service, let's examine the motivations for customers to seek cloud services. The 3rd “C” is for Cost.

Cost
The survival of every organization hinges on its ability to deliver value for its customers. It’s impossible to deliver high levels of value without addressing the cost for operating your organization. Referring back to the power example, what would it cost each of us to have a personal power generation plant for our homes? How much would the installation cost, how much labor would be required to operate it and maintain the equipment? While it seems quite obvious that a personal power generation plant wouldn’t make sense, most physical security applications are delivered exactly in this way. Software and hardware is purchased with sufficient capacity to handle present and some portion of future needs. The equipment is installed, powered, and maintained with internal resources. Very often excess resources exist in the host computers and within each machine that is operating the client software. When you add up the total cost of ownership, you will most likely be very surprised.

The SaaS-based Security as a Service model provides an excellent alternative to the traditional options, thus allowing organizations to focus on their core business. SaaS delivers outstanding economic value for the following reasons;

1. All users share a common computing infrastructure, to the economic benefit of all.
2. The cost model is scalable with users only paying for what they actually use.
3. The consumers of an application are free of all “back-end” management and maintenance expenses.
4. Up-front capital expenditures are replaced with flat, subscription-based operational expenses.

Beyond the excessive capital outlays for traditional options, recent studies have established that the largest part of application and server ownership costs actually exist in ongoing operational expenses, maintenance, and support agreements. This is particularly true of computer systems that provide infrastructure services like security, because they must be held to a higher standard of availability and performance than ordinary office equipment. In one representative study, the authors conclude that only 15% of the lifetime cost of server ownership is captured by the initial purchase price, which means that your $1,000 server can actually cost you over $6,600. [1]

In the case of physical security, our own study finds that for a typical branch office or managed property scenario, the SaaS model for security management offers significant operational and financial savings. This is due to both upfront cost reductions and the economies of scale of hosted application services. This study found that a Security as a Service solution enjoyed an advantage of nearly $26,000 (or 76%) over the server-based solution. [2]

- John Szczygiel

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[1] “Total Cost of Ownership Reduction with VMware,” VMware.com (March 10, 2008).
[2] Interested readers are referred to the full study, found here.