Managed Security Services

Announcing ISP-Planet's 2009 MSSP Survey

As we prepare to launch our biennial survey of Managed Security Service Providers, ISP-Planet asks: Which services are of greatest interest to you?

by Lisa Phifer President Core Competence, Inc. [January 15, 2009]

To help you find and choose Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), ISP-Planet has conducted detailed biennial surveys since 1999. Our fifth survey, published two years ago, detailed selected managed security service offerings from participating regional, national, and global providers, including Altoria Solutions, AT&T, Fiberlink Communications, Getronics, Globix (NEON), IBM Internet Security Systems, Megapath Networks, Perimeter Internetworking, Secure Designs, SecureWorks, Solutionary, Symantec, Unisys, Verizon Business, and Virtela.

Before launching each new survey, we conduct research to identify the most popular managed security services. For our 2007 survey, we chose to include managed firewall, intrusion detection/prevention, site to site and remote access VPNs, anti-virus/spyware, anti-spam, and web filtering services. Some of these have been covered ever since our very first survey, while others have been added as the security industry evolved. For example, our surveys tracked IDS/IPS customer premise equipment (CPE) as this service morphed from firewall feature to stand-alone appliance to integrated unified threat management (UTM) platform.

Given our target set of services, we then develop a detailed survey questionnaire, designed to explore the availability and attributes of each service. We do this because on-line service descriptions are notoriously vague, yet the process of selecting the right managed security service(s) for your business is intensely deep and technical. No published survey can provide all the answers—moreover, choosing an MSSP requires face-to-face discussion with prospective partners. But by providing apples-to-apples comparison of common service attributes, we want to help readers appreciate the services that are commercially-available, how they differ from those of the past, and questions that should be asked when shopping for a new MSSP or additional security services.

Finally, we invite dozens of MSSPs to participate in each year's survey by submitting a completed questionnaire. Invitees include past survey participants, companies that contacted us after our last survey, and new players in the MSSP market. Any provider that returns a 100 percent complete questionnaire for at least one service within that year's scope may be included in the survey results published by ISP-Planet.

If your company offers at least one of the above managed security services and would like to be invited to participate in this year's poll, just contact us by January 26, 2009.

In addition, we would like to invite you—our loyal ISP-Planet readers—to help shape this year's survey by completing a brief on-line poll. Rest assured that your answers will remain anonymous and will only be considered in aggregate. We simply want to know which managed security services are of greatest interest to you and your business in 2009. Your input will be used to help us focus this year's MSSP survey. To take our poll, please visit the following Zoomerang page no later than January 26, 2009:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228PRS68YEX

Thank you in advance for sharing your insights—we hope to make this year's survey of maximum benefit to YOU.

—Lisa Phifer, ISP-Planet Contributor

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