As more and more critical applications and services move to the cloud, organizations are increasingly receptive to the idea of using a managed security service to protect their network and information assets. The number and types of external threats to a network are growing uncontrollably, and unless a company has a dedicated and highly specialized team devoted to network security, it's hard to keep up with the rapidly changing threat landscape. After all, the threats of the Internet are the same for every company regardless of its size.
There are many benefits for small or midsize companies or even branch offices of large companies that use a managed security service. First of all, it's a great way to get the security expertise that would be too expensive to hire and retain in-house. The same goes for technology. A small company might not be able to afford to buy the best technology, but it can rent the use of the technology from a service provider. Moreover, the company can get a broader range of solutions that otherwise might not be in the budget -- solutions such as intrusion detection and prevention (IDP/IDS), antivirus and antispam, content filtering and secure VPNs.

We recently spoke to Network Box, a company that says it has the only fully managed unified threat management (UTM) device on the market. A customer would place this device at the edge of its network and let Network Box host, manage and analyze a range of fully integrated security functions that complement each other. For example, Network Box has three IDP/IDS applications running inline with the firewall to provide what the vendor calls zero latency. Every packet that passes through the device is scanned and analyzed. This technique allowed Network Box to catch and stop the slammer worm a few years ago when other companies not using Network Box's services were being attacked.

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