IT security market driven by increased threat awareness among enterprises

A Kable strategic focus report expects the global enterprise IT security market to reach US$34 billion by 2018, up from US$19.8 billion in 2013, growing at a CAGR of 11.4% from 2014 to 2018. This development is due to big data and cloud-based security services impacting the enterprise IT security market.

“Big data has broadened the field of security solutions, extending the scope of enterprise IT security solutions to support in-built big data applications. As a result, information security has been readdressed to facilitate the big data frameworks,” says Sandeep Mishra, analyst at Kable. Furthermore, analytics enabled security solutions and managed security service model are also gaining wide-scale acceptance among enterprises.

Identity and access management (IAM) is the fastest growing security solution
As organisations turn to cloud services and mobile apps to boost productivity and cut costs, managing user identities has become a prime concern for enterprises. The report shows that identity & access management (IAM) will witness adoption, growing at a CAGR of 13% between 2014 and 2018. Meanwhile, driven by the exponential demand for firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS) and virtual private network (VPN) concentrators, secure content and threat management is set to become the largest security segment by 2018 with a market size of US$17.5 billion.

Symantec the leading vendor in highly fragmented enterprise IT security market
The top ten security vendors contributed to about 44% of the total enterprise IT security market in 2013. Among the top ten vendors, Symantec led the list, with 10.2% of the vendor market share. Symantec has opened an independent publicly traded business unit that focuses wholly on enterprise IT security. This depicts an aggressive security centric focus in order to concentrate better on security solutions. Mishra adds: “The company strengthened its footing in the marketplace with improved go-to-market capabilities.”

With security investments becoming a viable investment for enterprises to achieve sustainable growth, security vendors will have to continuously upgrade their technologies to keep pace with the ever-evolving IT security threats. Security vendors who can address the scale of emerging threats and challenges that endanger enterprises in a digital powered workplace will gain considerable benefits in the long term.