SMBs to be big adopters of managed security

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Asia-Pacific managed security services (MSS) market is forecasted to exceed US$4 billion by end-2015, with revenues rising at a compounded growth rate of 19.7 per cent annually for the next five years.

Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Cathy Huang expects growing adoption for MSS by small and medium businesses (SMBs).

“As network security risks continue to mount and compliance mandates become more stringent, organizations are forced to implement an ever-increasing number of security technologies,” she says.

“The managed model is a compelling option for SMBs who can ill-afford large capital expenditure

(CAPEX) on security solutions, nor cope with the complexity of an endless onslaught of newer and increasingly targeted threats.”

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Asia-Pacific Managed Security Services (MSS) Market, finds that the market - covering 14 APAC countries, including Japan - grew an estimated 15 per cent in 2009, clocking revenues of just over US$1.31 billion.

By the end of 2010, Huang expects revenues to hit close to US$1.55 billion, rising 18.2 per cent over last year.

“The past two years saw many companies trimming their IT budgets and looking for more cost-effective ways of meeting their IT needs; network security included. This has fuelled keen interest in shared infrastructure delivery models such as MSS, which allow companies to shift to a more predictable operating expense model.” Huang explained.

Large enterprises have historically been the biggest consumers of IT solutions and services, and will likely remain so for a long time. This sector made up the bulk of MSS users in 2009 at approximately 75 per cent of the region’s revenues.

She believes, however, “As SMBs realise the economic sense in the shared infrastructure model, the attraction quotient would ramp-up significantly, particularly for hosted security services where the equipment is owned and housed at the service providers’ premises, and users need only pay for on-demand services.

“Hosted security services would appeal to the SMB sector even more when the service is bundled with other Internet or communications services,” Huang continued.

She added that virtualization and products such as unified threat management (UTM) have made hosted services all the more affordable for SMBs.

Larger businesses however are not in favor of hosted services due to the unpopularity of the cloud model for security, which is perceived as loss of control.

“They prefer instead to outsource the remote monitoring and management element of their security needs while hosting the infrastructure in-house.” she said.

As a result, monitoring/management services, which include round-the-clock monitoring and log analysis, are the most outsourced functions, accounting for about half of the total MSS revenues in 2009.