Waltham, Massacusetts-based Guardent offers a suite of services that are designed to enable ISPs, ASPs, local exchange carriers and co-location providers to offer outsourced managed security services.
The company was, along with Symantec Corp, one of two companies listed in the enviable Leader quadrant of Gartner Inc’s latest managed security services magic quadrant. VeriSign, by contrast, was bundled into the Niche Vendor quadrant.
VeriSign recently started pushing managed security as a key focus. The company believes its insight into the e-commerce payment processing market and domain name system give it a unique differentiator.
While VeriSign is a relatively new market entrant compared to four-year-old Guardent, it scored a high-profile win when Merrill Lynch decided to outsource its security to the company earlier this year.
VeriSign gains a new security network operations center. The firm also said it will make Guardent CEO Maria Cirino its senior VP and general manager for Managed Security Services, and that it will keep on 150 Guardent employees.
This was probably a no-brainer, as much of the value of outsourcing security lies in tapping into the expertise of dedicated security professionals.
Guardent’s services include security audits, penetration testing, firewall and intrusion-detection management. It provides outsourced security administration, monitoring and reporting using its TeraGuard information management platform.
TeraGuard takes disparate security data sources from a variety of networked devices and converts them into a single, normalized stream of security-related events, which it then analyzes and prioritizes.
The company was founded in 1998 and currently employs some 160 staff, which has been sourced from companies including PwC, IBM Global Services, and Lucent. The company has raised $50m in funding most recently from eVentures, Bank of Singapore, and Axxon Capital.
It claims to have grown its client base to more than 70 organizations, most of which are multinationals. Together the companies claim they will remotely manage more than 2,500 security devices for corporate customers.
Companies seem increasingly to be bringing in external IT services vendors to deliver and manage aspects of their security requirements, if IDC has its figures right. The research company has claimed that worldwide information security services spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.9%. It estimated the market as being worth $1.3bn in 2002.
The structure of the service provider sector is fragmented with as many as 21 vendors in the North American market alone. Contenders are emerging from network security software firms, telecoms operators and network carriers, and the specialist-managed security services outfits such as Riptech Inc, Articon-Integralis, and Checkpoint partners Netsec and Vistorm.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
