A Principle of Manufacturing Applied to Security

By Michael Osterman
in

One of the basic principles of manufacturing a product that loses weight is to produce it as close to the source of the raw material as possible. For example, producing lumber is a process that involves cutting away from a log everything that doesn’t like 2x4s and the like. Instead of shipping over great distances what will eventually become sawdust, lumber producers opt to manufacture lumber as close as practical to the source of the raw material so that they can reduce their transportation costs. There are exceptions, of course – such as those who ship water from Évian-les-Bains, France or Fiji—but most manufacturers adhere to this principle.

The same applies to email security. Because at least 75% of the email traversing the Internet is spam or malware and even less valuable than sawdust, it makes sense to remove it from the desired end product as close to the source as possible. That’s why many organizations have opted to deploy hosted email security either as a replacement for their on-premise email security infrastructure or as a supplement to their on-premise systems.  By allowing a hosted provider to cut away the garbage long before someone must pay to transport it to its final destination, bandwidth requirements are reduced both in the internal network and across the Internet as a whole.  Add to this the reduced requirement for on-premise storage of spam and malware as a further means of reducing costs and an added benefit of the hosted model.

There are a few different ways of realizing the benefits of a hosted model, each of which has various advantages. You can go completely with hosted and totally eliminate any on-premise infrastructure, you can opt for a homegrown hybrid approach in which different vendors provide the hosted and on-premise components, or you can go with a hybrid system offered by a single vendor. An increasing number of security vendors are offering integrated hybrid approaches.

We are about to publish a white paper that compares the homegrown and integrated hybrid approaches and will be announcing it shortly.

Published August 2, 2010