Telecom companies have reach and resources in their favor, of course. But “it’s not just economies of scale” that give them an advantage, Gartner’s Pescatore says. “It’s that the carriers have access to information that the individual enterprise doesn’t.”

That’s the information that AT&T CSO Amoroso sees through his window on the Internet in northern New Jersey. And that’s the information that he’s hoping to use to move AT&T’s security business from one focused on simply managing customers’ security equipment, to one that’s truly cleaning up the pipes and plumbing of the Internet. “It’s like the blind men and the elephant,” Amoroso says, referencing the folk tale of the blind men who each, upon feeling a different part of an elephant, draw vastly different conclusions about the creature before them. “When you sit as one node on the network, you don’t have context. The service provider sits right smack in the middle of the context and has a vantage point that nobody else can have.” His favorite example is that AT&T security analysts knew about the 2003 Slammer worm before it hit, because of strange traffic going to port 1434.

“I’ve looked at this traffic,” Amoroso continues, “and realized that there’s just a goldmine of security information.”

Virtual Security
The centerpiece of AT&T’s strategy to build security into the network—dubbed “in-the-cloud” security services—is a concept that’s gotten increasing attention over the past couple years. Right now, as CSOs are all too aware, most companies purchase and manage (or outsource the management of) a slew of security devices, from antivirus software to firewalls to intrusion detection and prevention systems. With an in-the-cloud setup, however, many of these tasks can be handled using a virtual device administered by an MSSP. It’s basically a software-as-a-service model, with monthly service fees replacing product, installation and maintenance costs. Gartner projects that as early as 2008, 30 percent of managed security service revenue could come from services delivered in the cloud.

Telecom companies aren’t the only ones pushing for this model. Antispam companies such as MessageLabs and Postini have adopted it, as have pure-play MSSPs such as Perimeter eSecurity and VigilantMinds (which recently merged with another MSSP, Solutionary). “Think of us like the water utility,” says Brad Miller, CEO of Perimeter eSecurity, a $24 million, venture-capital-backed company in Milford, Conn., that used to call itself Perimeter Internetworking. “You could have one big water utility that cleans the water, or every house could have its own water filter. Which way is more efficient?” Obviously, Miller thinks the former.