MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: The Asia-Pacific security software market will reach revenues of $4 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 10 per cent from the $2.49 billion it hit in 2010, predicts Ovum.

The independent technology analyst finds that the strong growth will be driven by the increasing threat to enterprises from organised gangs and the changing business technology landscape.

Watch CIOL video cast on: Changing security landscape

Ovum principal analyst Graham Titterington commented: “The global security software market will see strong growth during the next few years, with revenues increasing from $16.76 billion at the end of 2010 to $23.3 billion at the end of 2015. Asia-Pacific will experience stronger growth because of the pace of technological advance in the region and the growing level of security awareness.”

“One of the key drivers for this is the increasing threat to enterprises from well-organised gangs from rival organisations, which want to steal valuable data for their own gains. These organisations, which include governments, have the resources to ramp up the threat level and launch advanced and persistent attacks, which are difficult to defeat. The competitive market in the region makes this threat a particular concern.”

“However, changes in business technology and operations are also creating new security demands. The major changes that will drive the growth of the market during the next few years are cloud computing, increased mobility and business use of social networking. The security issues these phenomena raise can be significant, and they need to be tackled accordingly.”

According to Titterington, emerging trends such as greater interoperability of systems between organisations, the use of shared user authentication systems (particularly for enterprise customers and employees of partner organisations) and increasing use of virtualisation technology will also have an impact on take-up of security software.

He believes much of the investment from enterprises will be in encryption software, along with advanced encryption key management environments, as these play a key role in the fight to protect sensitive and valuable data from hackers. Other key investment targets will be new types of anti-malware protection to counter the huge threat the Internet poses.

Titterington continued: “Enterprises are becoming more aware of the threat posed to them by hackers due to the increasing number of high-profile attacks on companies such as Sony. These cases are highlighting the potential damage that businesses face if sensitive and valuable data is stolen.”

Ovum has also released a new security vendor rankings and market share analysis, which shows that Symantec is the world number one, followed by McAfee and then Trend Micro.