The Security-as-a-Service Market for Small and Medium Enterprises

ABSTRACT

As small and medium enterprises move toward cloud computing for their IT operations, they discover that securing their information assets is a challenge. A new set of providers offering fee-based security as a service (SECaaS) has emerged. The SECaaS market is still nascent, and important questions remain if these providers are to be successful. This research uses a system dynamics approach to shed light on the SECaaS market in the context of SECaaS costs, and security threat conditions. The results indicate that consumers are price sensitive but not threat sensitive, and have important implications for SECaaS providers and consumers.

KEYWORDS:

• Small and medium enterprises
• security as a service
• simulation
• system dynamics