DefendNet, for example, offers Firewall-1, but only for sites of 500 users or more. Below that number, it just doesn't pay, says Giordano. According to the Yankee Group , a market consultancy, some providers are moving beyond these basic services to offer secured hosting and e-commerce services. Through outsourcing, network managers relieve themselves of those burdens while getting the benefits of this security spec. Additional consulting services are being added, as well.
Penetration testing is a big one.
By employing white hat hackers, providers aim to find holes in key Web sites or incorporate Internet connections to ensure they aren't hacked. Another approach is running a vulnerability scan, a less-intrusive version of a penetration test. All the vendors interviewed for this article offered penetration testing or vulnerability scans except Genuity, which expects to incorporate penetration testing by publication time. Penetration testing is great for identifying holes, but detecting attacks as they occur requires log analysis. Vendors like ISS, IBM, and Pilot all claim to perform trend analysis on the logs of installed security devices, detect attacks as they occur, and then enable their support teams to take the appropriate action to stop such attacks in the future.