Fresh off of raising another $9.8 million in funding, Soha Systems this week took the wraps off a cloud security service that can not only be configured in a minutes; it eliminates the need to remotely manage multiple distributed instances of firewalls on their own.

Soha Systems CEO Haseeb Budhani says Soha Cloud makes use of distributed instances of “cloudlet software” to establish a connection with the Soha Cloud using the SPDY open networking protocol created by Google (GOOG).

Once that link is established all network traffic is routed through the Soha Cloud, which Budhani says then provides a new first line of defense using IT security infrastructure deployed by Soha Systems.

Budhani says it only takes about 10 minutes to set up a connection without requiring any tunneling to set up a virtual private network (VPN). The Soha software can be deployed on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Platform, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloudAir or any OpenStack-compatible cloud environment.

Rather than battling malware at the edge of the corporate network, Budhani says the location of the battle is shifted to the Soha Cloud. Any network latency issues that might arise by having to send network traffic through another cloud are compensated for by usage of the SPDY protocol to send encrypted data, says Buhani.

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Cloud security has always been the number one reason IT organizations don’t shift more workloads into the cloud. By relying on a cloud service to actually secure those cloud computing environments, the cost of securing the cloud is offloaded to a cloud service.

Solution providers in the channel at first blush may not be all that excited about a cloud service that automates much of the IT security process. But given the chronic shortage of IT security professional available Soha Systems does give them a way to manage security across a much broader array of customers.

Soha Systems has already signed a handful of partners that are using cloud service to deliver managed security services. At this juncture, there’s no doubt that the rise of the cloud is creating massive demand for managed security services. The challenge facing solution providers is that the cost of investing in the security infrastructure required to provide those services can be prohibitive. Soha Systems provides a cloud service that offloads much of the cost of acquiring that infrastructure, while still creating the opportunity for managed security service providers to manage more than application deployments than could ever probably do on their own.