Security firm Symantec on Wednesday announced the launch of its Hosted Endpoint Protection, a new cloud-based product targeting small and medium sized businesses. As Symantec explains it, the new service will make it easier for SMBs to deploy comprehensive security across their network without the need for more hardware or management software.

"As the hosted model for messaging security has become increasingly popular for its ease of management and deployment, organizations are similarly motivated by the reduced complexity that cloud-based services can offer while effectively protecting their endpoint systems," said Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President, Symantec Hosted Services. "Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection leverages our SaaS expertise to deliver advanced technologies that help protect customer systems without requiring additional hardware, management software, or dedicated IT staffing."

Some of the features include always-on protection for Endpoints, a Web-based management console, the ability to add new computers without requiring on-site management servers, automatic updates, scalability, and the speed at which the service can be deployed via email invitation or silently pushed to the customer's network, Symantec says.

Those wishing for a free trial can do so here.

According to a new IDC report, the SaaS BI market is set to explode in 2010 and beyond with a compound annual growth rate of 22.4 percent through 2013. The reason? A combination of increased product sophistication, tight IT budgets, and other factors.

"The more applications (therefore BI data sources) are moved into the cloud, the fewer reasons there may be to build and operate BI applications in-house," said Boris Evelson, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Evelson went on to say that there are a lot of good reasons to adopt SaaS BI, such as making front-office workers more productive. But it can also be useful for some larger companies. To give an example, Forrester points to an unnamed retailer that does 90 percent of its business during the holidays. For most of the year, the company handles its own BI and reporting, but towards the end of the year, the company turns to a SaaS vendor to help handle the influx of numbers.

According to market research firm Gartner, worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $7.5 billion in 2009. That's a big turnaround from 2008 -- 17.7 percent, to be exact -- when revenue fell flat at $6.4 billion.

"The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets," said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. "The composition of the worldwide SaaS landscape is evolving as vendors continue to extend regionally, increase penetration within existing accounts and ‘greenfield’ opportunities, and offer more-vertical-specific solutions as part of their service portfolio or through partners."

But that's not the only good news. Gartner says the market will show consistent growth at least through 2013, by which time SaaS revenue is expected to exceed $14 billion in the enterprise sector.