Cisco Security On-Line

Cisco announced their intent to market IronPort email protection as a Cloud-based service as well as the current appliance form. This is an important first step for Cisco in terms of Cloud security offering. Initially Cisco is going to market this only for larger customers making the implementation somewhat simpler since they don't have to do as much multi-tenant work as they will for smaller customers. A key value proposition is the fact that a customer can manage the Cloud and local forms of IronPort (they are viewed as synergistic) simply and harmoniously which is not as easy for some that use Google/Postini in the Cloud and another vendor locally. We speculate there will be further offerings along the lines of "clean pipes" (Cloud based equivalent of firewall and proxy devices) which will be all the more interesting.