Emerging business technologies will fuel the security solutions market to double-digit compound annual growth rate of about $US1.6 billion by 2011, according to IDC.
The growth will be driven by new corporate technologies such as wireless networks, continuous security threats, and government and industry regulations, said IDC senior analyst, security solutions, Patrik Bihammar.
Security was one of the fastest growing markets in the software space and within some IT segments, he said.
"This is an area that is always changing and threats are becoming more sophisticated. It's almost like a cat-and-mouse race between the good guys and bad guys," he said. "We are starting to see cyber-criminals going after people's sensitive information, which is putting higher requirements on how organisations protect their data."
Bihammar highlighted identity access management, secure content management as well as managed security services and unified threat management (UTM) as hotspots. "There are similar reasons behind the growth in managed security services and UTM, which is around simplifying the manageability of the security environment. As we move into different types of security, it's getting so complex and out of hand especially for smaller organisations," he said.
Bihammar said the proliferation of VoIP and instant messaging had a huge impact on security from a data leakage perspective and predicted a lot of growth would stem from messaging security products.
"Most organisations are quite bad at controlling what is actually going out in terms of intellectual property," he said. "Somebody sending out confidential information via instant messaging is an example where I believe organisations need to invest more in security, gain control and encrypt information that is leaving rather than just worrying about bad guys getting in."
He said another market trend was the consolidation and convergence between vendors and security products.
"We are seeing industry giants like Cisco, EMC and Microsoft showing interest in security at the moment and they are picking up more and more vendors to broaden their offering," he said. "The other thing is also convergence between different security technologies."
