Savvis Inc. said this week it has received top positioning as a visionary in Gartners Managed Security Services Providers, North America” Magic Quadrant.

The research firms designation is a big boon for Savvis, a cloud infrastructure and hosted IT company, as more enterprises turn to Software-as-a-Service and other cloud products. Thats the case even though Gartner doesnt consider Savvis to be an market-share leader in the managed security services space; rather, Gartner is referring to Savvis focus, quality and reliability.

Nonetheless, being named a Gartner visionary is a big deal.

We believe it represents significant industry validation of Savvis’ managed security services,” said Chris Richter, vice present of security products and services for Savvis. “Managed security is a core element of Savvis’ virtualized and cloud compute solutions, allowing our enterprise clients to reduce risk as they streamline and optimize their IT infrastructures.”

To that point, Gartner predicts managed security services providers will see continued growth in North America, even though SMBs will fight for lower-cost options to what enterprises are willing to pay. The better news is that Gartner expects enterprises to increase their use of SaaS and request more cloud-based security SaaS. Those areas will grow faster than the customer-premises-equipment managed security services market throughout 2011, Gartner said.