Dell's announcement of a broad range of new and enhanced security tools and services for small and midsized businesses includes network endpoint security, and will ultimately, in partnership with SecureWorks, offer a hardware/software solution that includes security management and threat identification and monitoring.Combining new offerings, refined and expanded existing products as well as services to be unveiled before the end of the year, the Dell Security Solution Portfolio approaches threat and data protection issues from several directions:

Network Security: Dell's appliance-based J-SRX Services Gateways unified threat system, developed with Juniper Networks, includes firewall, VPN, Intrusion prevention, anti-spam, anti-virus and web filtering.

Endpoint Security Building upon its newly acquired KACE management appliances, Dell's endpoint security offering will include vulnerability assessment and remediation, as well as patch management.The Dell Kace Secure Browser tool (available here) will be included in the offering.

Security Services The biggest news in the announcement may turn out to be Dell's partnering with SecureWorks for the release, before end of year, of a managed security service that will include monitoring, security management, Web app scans, security assessment and compliance assistance.

Whether or not small and midsized businesses will respond in the numbers needed to make Dell's enthusiasm for the market worthwhile remains, like pricing for its managed services, to be seen. But this is clearly a signal that Dell has its bigbiz eye on small and medium sized customers, and in the already hot SMB security services market, another big player can only mean more competitive pricing for a broader range of services and products.