The global market for cloud security services grew almost 14 percent last year as service providers looked to virtualisation to scale rollouts, new research has revealed.
According to Infonetics’s Cloud and CPE Managed Security Services report, the cloud security services market rose to $7.4 billion (€6.4 billion) in 2014, up from $6.3 billion (€5.6 billion) the previous year.
Infonetics’ report analyses and forecasts the market for cloud and CPE-based security services to small, medium and large businesses.
It revealed cloud-based services made up 46 percent of revenues from the managed security market in 2014, which totalled $15.8 billion (€14 billion).
Customer premises equipment (CPE)-based offerings made up the remaining 54 percent. However, Infonetics forecast that cloud-based services will overtake CPE-based services by 2018 as SDN and NFV open up new security solutions for customers.
According to Infonetics, content security makes up the largest chunk of revenues from cloud security services, followed by managed firewalls, “other” security services, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation and intrusion detection and prevention systems.
Jeff Wilson, the firm’s research director for cybersecurity technology, said: “Our long-term outlook for the already very large cloud and CPE managed security services market, especially for cloud services, is quite strong as providers begin to leverage their software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) rollouts to really scale the delivery of managed security services.”
“Providers are leaning heavily on SDN and the promise of NFV, and this will help them deliver a wide range of new security services that leverage virtual appliances for protecting applications, data and infrastructure in their own clouds, and delivering new services to customers.”
Read more:
Orange Business Services launches SDN pilot for SMEs
Advocates continue to make case for virtualisation but admit they face bumpy ride