Cloud, Vendor Consolidation Drive Virtual Security Appliance Mkt

Market research firm Infonetics Research released its latest Virtual Security Appliances report, which tracks revenue and licenses for content security gateways, firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs), Secure Socket Layer (SSL) VPNs, and intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems (IDS/IPS).

“As virtualisation deployments heat up, and cloud security continues to be a hot (and hotly debated) topic, customers have been busy buying and deploying security solutions for their virtualised environments, as reflected by the ongoing growth in this space. Juniper’s acquisition of Altor in late 2010 accelerated revenue in this market, as nearly all of Juniper’s major competitors- Cisco, Check Point, F5, Blue Coat, Citrix, IBM, Symantec, Trend Micro- increased their product development and marketing focus for virtual appliances since the acquisition,” notes Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.

Virtual Security Appliance Market Highlights

• The worldwide virtual security appliance market more than doubled between 2009 and 2010, to $429 million

• Infonetics forecasts the virtual security appliance market to grow to $1.9 billion by 2015

• Year-over-year, from the first quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, the virtual security appliance market is up 75%

• The fastest growing segment of the virtual security appliance market, content security gateways, is already a very large market, making its 9.5% growth in 1Q11 over 4Q10 all the more impressive