Appliance, Cloud, or Software

The age old question of whether to buy an appliance or build out hardware yourself and buy software to run on your own general purpose operating system, has been getting serious competition from the cloud, or SaaS (Software as a Service). IT admins now have 3 choices when selecting how to implement web security for their organization. The question is how do you choose which is right for your organization. The key here is that the right answer isn't the same for everyone.

There's an obvious difference between the previous choices of appliance or build your own versus a cloud solution, and that's based in the accounting, which may not be a key criteria for an IT admin, but is certainly a consideration for your finance group. An appliance or build your own has capex ramifications, and of course a cloud solution is limited to opex costs. If your finance arm rules your expenditures you may not get a choice when it's time to upgrade your proxy or secure web gateway.

But for those of you that do have a choice, it may have to do with how much security expertise you have on hand, how much control you need over your maintenance windows, and how many of your users are remote and travel extensively. Each of these will affect which solution you choose, and may even cause you to consider a hybrid of two solutions. If you happen to have extensive expertise, build your own may be the way to go, especially if you need an extremely custom solution.

For those that need ease of use, and quick deployments, an appliance or cloud makes more sense. Those that need control of their maintenance windows should of course avoid a cloud where they will be bound by the service providers maintenance windows. And those with lots of remote users or users who travel extensively, may want the cloud solution to cover those users when they aren't behind the proxy in the data center. And when you have a mix of these requirements you may want to have more than one solution in place. For example, you may want an appliance in your data center and a cloud solution for your remote and traveling users. In the end, it may turn out for most organizations a hybrid solution makes the most sense.