Astaro stresses benefits of outsourced security

IT security specialist Astaro was an early advocate of outsourced security for ISPs, as well as for other organisations, according to the company's Regional Manager Aziz M Amer, and Astaro is determined to continue encouraging telecom operators and other organisations to consider outsourcing aspects of the security to specialist players.

Amer says the benefits of outsourcing are many. Companies gain improved security from a specialist and save on infrastructure and service costs. Yet many ISPs and telcos are resistant to the idea, partly because they think customers will object to their internet traffic passing through a third party.

"We were ahead of our time by four years in trying to preach the benefits of outsourced security for ISPs," Amer says. "Now people are starting to listen."

But he adds that while a mindset shift is needed to encourage ISPs and also end users to allow traffic to be passed through a third party security provider, the industry does seem to be heading in that direction.

The benefit of this type of outsourcing is that it cuts down the amount of spam, junk mail and viruses on an ISP's network, which benefits the end user and also frees up valuable bandwidth on networks, saving money and improving speeds and customer experience.

"Corporates are using it, and ISPs are starting to use it. We have done a project with a leading ISP in Turkey to protect all of its home users, centrally managed by Astaro's servers," he says.

Amer adds that with security a growing concern and more people working from home, he expects ISP security to be a key growth market.