ANTenna Blog -- Security

Small and midsized businesses are "poised" for security growth in 2010, according to a recent panel of experts. But that same conversation included warnings that the growth would come while SMBs continue to slash budgets. Paradox? Not when you factor in the cloud and security services.

The security panel that was part of an Everything Channel SMB event (registration required for on-demand access) included a fairly optimistic look at prospects for SMB security growth next year.

Optimistic -- as long as you're in the security-in-the-cloud, security as an SaaS business.

And even the optimism there, offered by executives from security companies Fortinet and Kaspersky Lab, was tempered by an awareness of the challenge of selling cloud-based security to businesses concerned about, well, the security of cloud-based security.

Budget and cost concerns are undoubtedly going to drive some, maybe quite a few, businesses to become (relatively) early adopters of cloud-based security solutions.

But cloud concerns themselves are likely, I believe, to hold just as many businesses back from making a large commitment to security as a service in the next quarter or so.

Certainly the need for stable, accepted cloud security standards is becoming an issue that the industry is addressing.

The shifting -- and exponentially increasing -- nature of the threat environment is another factor that will encourage more adoption of cloud security services, as one Panda exec told me earlier this year.

The panelists at the Everything Channel event were well-aware of the challenges, and the different areas from which those challenges flowed. VARs seemed split, in fact, on whether or not a single solution-provider would be viable in the emerging cloud and cloud-threat environment.

So what do you see? Are you planning on moving at least some of your security to cloud services in the next few months? The next year?

Or are you going to wait and see?

Let me and bMighty's readers hear from you.