Businesses are beginning to warm up to the idea of contracting intrusion prevention services to protect their data centers, and their sources of choice are security-focused solution providers.

A new report by Infonetics Research finds that businesses are increasingly looking to protect their investments in data center optimization with intrusion prevention - systems designed to detect and stop anomalous and unauthorized network activity. The top two motivating factors: preventing damage in the data center and limiting the impact of security problems.

“The re-architecture of data centers is top of mind for many large organizations, and security will be one of the very first considerations in a major data center overhaul, so it makes sense that this is a critical driver for large businesses to invest in IPS,” wrote Jeff Wilson, Infonetics Research's principal analyst for network security.

IPS is tricky technology. Unlike its cousin, IDS (intrusion detection systems), IPS products are designed to sit inline and actively monitor traffic for malicious and unauthorized activity. Security alerts kick off automated responses that either quarantine or drop the activity. Setting up and optimizing those rules and decision trees takes time and often results in high levels of false positives if not done properly.

The Infonetics report found that businesses aren't so much concerned with IPS false positives - typically the blocking of legitimate traffic and applications. This shows that data center managers are more concerned about the potential damage and data loss of a security breach than periodic denials of service caused by the IPS.

IPS complexity is the reason behind the growing consideration of cloud-based IPS services. An on-premises IPS solution requires persistent human management. Outsourcing that responsibility to a third party, as 43 percent of the Infonetics survey participants said they're considering, provides the data center protection benefit without the in-house management overhead.

The good news is security solution providers stand to benefit from the growing consideration of IPS as a service. Of those saying they're considering cloud-based IPSes, one-quarter preferred sourcing from security solution providers. The balance said they would consider working with telecom carriers. Not bad, especially since many carriers are offering their network and security managed services to solution providers for resale.