Yesterday we announced our first cloud appliance, the Perimeter Profiler. We are making a strategic investment in cloud computing in our product line and wanted to share our thinking.

The first reason is that as your trusted advisor in the security and compliance domain, we need to understand the technology driven risks that you are facing. We have been ahead of the curve in evaluating the security of cloud infrastructures, and understand that the risks of cloud computing currently overshadow the cost benefit. We are feeding this knowledge directly into our product line to help you to qualify and quantify these risk in your organizations.

The second reason is that cloud computing does present a cost advantage to traditional data center hosting environments. The ability to provide our software as cloud appliances allows us to create a new model for delivering security solutions. This new model improves upon the security concerns that we have heard regarding traditional software-as-a-service models.

The primary advantage in the cloud model is that cloud appliances are private instances of our software; these are not multi-tenant software systems that are shared among multiple customers. These cloud appliances are still managed as a simple, hosted service, but you do not have to compromise with the shared platforms commonly found with software-as-a-service solutions.

Cloud appliances also allow us to provide a hybrid architecture; you can choose which components to maintain on-premise and which components to source in the cloud. You can make these choices around your tolerance for risk and your need for cost minimization.

In the end, cloud computing will continue to change how we source technology in our organizations. If your security vendors do not understand cloud computing, then they will not be able to help you to understand the risks of cloud computing. We are investing in building this expertise. We want to know how it works, how it changes the game within our product line, and how it changes your requirements in using our technology.