MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – McAfee is building on its nine-year-old security-as-a-service strategy and positioning itself as an end-to-end provider of security in the cloud and on the customer’s premise.

The demand for security-as-a-service offerings is accelerating, both in the small- and medium-sized business and larger enterprise spaces, with significant growth expected over the next few years.

“For us, it comes down to the market opportunity. And right now, we see a market both from what the industry analysts are saying and from our own experience & that’s growing 30 percent a year and will be approximately $4 billion in 2012,” said Marc Olesen, senior vice president and general manager of software-as-a-service at McAfee.

According to Olesen, McAfee’s value proposition lies in three areas – diversity, maturity and reliability. Essentially, it comes down to the company’s nine years of experience in providing security-as-a-service offerings, he said.

Additionally, Olesen referred to studies that analyzed savings of time and money. A Tolly Group study analyzed the total cost of ownership (TCO) of security, finding that organizations can save upwards of 50 percent of the deployment costs by choosing security-as-a-service or an on-premise solution, he said.

“When you look at saving time, our solutions are already up, running and available. We can really, within minutes, turn customers on to our solutions and enable them,” Olesen said.

McAfee covers security from endpoint, Web, e-mail and vulnerability management perspectives with its cloud offerings.

The next step, which McAfee kicked off with the launch of the latest release of its Total Protection Service, is to integrate its various offerings into one console, Olesen said.

“One of the key things we announced … was the launch of our latest release of Total Protection Service. It embodies everything we’re driving towards with our security-as-a-service business,” Olesen said.

It has also “dramatically” improved ease-of-use by creating a highly customizable dashboard that takes advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities, he said.

One interesting change in the market is that security-as-a-service is moving upwards from being mostly an SMB play to also being a large enterprise play, Olesen explained. He referred to Forrester statistics that found security-as-a-service deployments in the enterprise increased 33 percent in 2008.

For the channel, this continues to open up opportunities — both for resellers focused on the SMB market and the larger enterprise markets. Although the majority of McAfee’s security-as-a-service business is SMB, the percentage that is enterprise business continues to change each month.

“As security-as-a-service continues to outpace the growth of on-premise software, you’re just going to continue to see that balance shift. On-premise software, I’m not going to advocate that it’s going away. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Really for us at McAfee, it’s all about choice,” Olesen said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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