As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, customer entities and associated data are increasingly exposed to security threats such as unsolicited e-mail (“spam”), distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, trojans, worms, viruses, and the like. In order to alleviate such problems, customer entities, enterprise and otherwise, have turned to dedicated hardware that, in networking terms, is positioned topographically near to network ingress/egress points, to implement services such as spam control, firewalling, DDoS protection, and other services for protecting networks to enable the networks to function effectively. Such hardware is often expensive and difficult to properly configure, maintain and support. As such, the addition or maintenance of such hardware can often have a significant impact on an organization, possibly being disruptive and/or decreasing productivity. Additionally, hardware-based threat management solutions typically do not automatically scale their capabilities up and down based on demand, perceived threat level, and/or the like.