APEJ Security Market Posts A 7.5% Growth In 2010

In the fast changing IT landscape of today’s enterprise, security threat continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Security software vendors continue to innovate new solutions against fast changing threats. Further, revenues are driven by cloud and virtualisation, which is increasing security concerns.

According to IDC’s Asia/Pacific Semiannual Security Software Tracker, most security markets in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region registered a double-digit growth in the second half of 2010, compared to the same period in 2009. In terms of the whole region, the security software market grew to US$755 million in 2H 2010, representing a growth of 2.3% over 2H 2009. In full year 2010, the market also enjoyed a growth of 7.5% and reached out to US$1.438 billion from 2009.

IDC expects the Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Security and Vulnerability Management (SVM) markets to experience the largest growth of 17% and reach US$375 million and US$161 million respectively in 2011. The Secure Content and Threat Management (SCTM) market is expected to grow at 13.3% and reach US$1,059 million in 2011.

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“IT Security threats are not just limited within an organisation but have wider ripple effects to the connected parties, such as their customers and partners. Confidential information of the companies may be breached by improper use of social network media and network connected. Furthermore, organisations have to face the increasing amount of ‘Zero Day’ malware coming from hackers. The security landscape is still seeing many challenges that exploit the vulnerabilities of applications, insider sabotages, identity fraud, breaches of insecure networks and unauthorised access to corporate systems and networks and the confidential data. The evolution of these misdeeds is unlikely to be stopped or slowed down. Meanwhile, organisations need to have a security strategy and look into ways to minimising their exposure and loss. They should have a clear picture of what kind of information they process and who have the access to that information. Stakeholder could anticipate what are the value impact and how information might be ‘lost’,” says Marco Lam, Market Analyst of IDC Asia/Pacific Software Research.

IT Security guidelines are continuing to be issued and updated from government bureau and industrial enforcing institutions, such as FSI, Medical and Telco. Companies are required to align with international regulations, standards and best practices when collaborating with business partners around the world. Therefore, regulatory compliance and industrial experience play a significant role in the security software industry.

Looking forward to the near future and the impact of the development of Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), IDC predicts cloud computing and virtualisation technology to be the long-term development directions for optimising management overheads in the security software market. Automation and centralised management is the ‘paradise’ that organisations are looking for. A cloud-based security software will provide a real time protection to the information flows with broad user coverage as it just requires one single point for automated patches and thus quicker in terms of definitions generating and updating. Meanwhile, security software solutions in the virtualised environment have become the fundamental equipment amongst solution providers, as the highway to virtualised environment getting established and in a faster speed with the propagation of cloud computing.

As the new 3G and even 4G infrastructure becomes more prevalent, remote access security is not just about the traditional wireless connections in our business world. More network connections are coming from mobile devices like smart phones and tablets. Solution providers are struggling to improve their security solutions and make it also capable of handling security issues and requirements generated from personal devices for business uses.

“IDC expects companies to continue to leverage and integrate new security technologies to defend against intrusion and malware. Consequently, CIOs will keep on evaluating and adopting the latest IT security solution proactively. Thus, the overall security software market will continue to experience healthy growth,” Marco concludes.