Many managed services providers (MSPs) have spent the past few years contemplating how to implement cloud services. Do you build your own data center, or do you partner with someone like Amazon Web Services (AMZN) or Rackspace (RAX)? Or do you do a little of both? What’s the best approach?

Because infrastructure as a service prices offered by giants such as AWS continue to drop, MSPmentor has recommended that MSPs consider “riding the rails.”  That is, instead of building the infrastructure, let these big companies do it for you and package your services to run on their existing infrastructure.

That’s just the route that Referentia Systems has taken for its most recent offering. The Hawaii-based services provider is using AccelOps network management and security platform to start a managed security service practice. But the technology is deployed in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

AccelOps worked with Referentia to package its platform to deploy in Amazon EC2. I asked AccelOps and Referentia whether latency was a problem, but even though the Amazon data center used was in Virginia, they never experienced latency issues.

Referentia deployed the solution which includes security information and event management for Prince Resorts Hawaii, to provide the customer with greater insights into IT operations and detect and proactively resolve problems.

Prince Resorts Hawaii must comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) regulations.

“One of the reasons why we like AccelOps is that more and more of our mid-tier customers want the security monitoring, but don’t know if they can justify the cost,” Referentia director of solutions, Tony Giandomenico, told me. “But they also need the application performance monitoring. AccelOps has merged that together into a single pane of glass.”

AccelOps says that Referentia is just the beginning. While the company has been working with MSPs for years with on premise deployment, this is the first time it has put its solution in the public cloud. Now the company is looking to take its monitoring, management and security offering to other MSPs that are looking to ride the rails, CEO Flint Brenton told me.

AccelOps says its virtual appliance software manages security, network performance and compliance, all on a single screen. The software works across traditional data centers as well as public, private and hybrid clouds. It provides managed service providers such as Referentia with native multi-tenancy and has been designed for scalable deployment as a virtual appliance that can be deployed completely within the cloud. AccelOps real-time log and event information from inside the EC2 infrastructure is more comprehensive than what would be available through an application programming interface (API) the company said.