Managed security hot despite growing threats: Report

CALIFORNIA, USA: Market research firm Infonetics Research expects the security SaaS segment of the market to more than double between 2011 and 2015.

Infonetics in its latest report notes that it will double because companies today wrestle to keep up with the short window they have to protect themselves against web threats and to protect a geographically diverse user base accessing corporate data and applications from an immense variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, kiosks, etc.)

Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research, said: "Despite the global economic meltdown that started in mid-2008, the security services market is strong and growing, with demand driven by the proliferation of security threats, growth in the use of mobile devices, and the shift to the cloud. It's often cheaper for companies to hire a service provider to manage their security than to do it themselves, and with the growing complexity of security solutions, this outsourcing trend will continue."

As per the report, CPE-based security services revenue will drop to 54 per cent of the total managed security market while cloud-based services and SaaS grow to 46 per cent (from 38 per cent in 2010) by 2015.

"We expect the managed security services market to grow about 13 per cent in 2011, and see healthy annual growth through at least 2015, when we forecast it to reach $16.8 billion, with the strongest growth coming from the SaaS segment," notes Wilson.

Small and medium organizations are increasing their spending on managed security services, such that, by 2015, Infonetics expects medium and large business to spend the same amount on security services, and expects small organization spending to grow to more than 1/4 of the global market.