Barracuda has snapped at a failure by suppliers to provide customers with a menu of payment options for cloud services.
In new research, Barracuda found that if pricing and licensing models were not flexible enough they risk being a factor that can hold back further adoption in cloud services and 41 percent of organisations felt that firewall pricing and licensing was inappropriate for the cloud and that was an issue.
More than 73 percent felt that they wanted flexible pricing options that included pay-as-you-go and metered. Only 23 percent were happy paying for cloud-based security tools in the same way they had always paid in the past.
Barracuda director business development EMEA Chris Hill said that it looked closely at licensing models to make sure it could provide customers with choices.
“We are an on-premise firewall provider as well, and the cloud is very different so a lot of our time and research has been digging into why that is and what the customers are thinking and you can’t do the same thing in the cloud as you do on-premise,” he said.
“There are different ways of buying your stuff in the cloud, and we make sure that we can adapt to the different consumption models that there are in the cloud,” he added.
Hill said that bring-your-own licenses, meter billing and other models were emerging and vendors needed to keep a close eye on the way users wanted to pay for services.
When cloud first emerged most vendors tried to use their traditional licensing approaches but that had come under pressure, and more flexible methods had been needed.
“The thought process has gone from not paying for the physical box anymore but for what they use and that allows, in turn, the chance to utilise some of the features of the cloud, with the chance to deploy more than you could on-premise in a distributed world”, he said.
“Pricing models have helped the users with flexibility, and we have adapted to make sure we can sell that way. One of the biggest bottlenecks is people worried about the licensing models in the cloud. They have the technology they love on-premise and want to be able to do the same in the cloud but realise they can’t afford to do what they are doing there if they follow the same model and that is a blocker”, he added.
