Aaccording to Gartner, growth in worldwide cloud-based security services will be $5.9 billion in 2017, up 21 percent from 2016 and the overall growth in the cloud-based security services market is above that of the total information security market. Gartner estimates that this market will reach close to $9 billion by 2020.
“Email security, web security and identity and access management (IAM) remain organizations’ top-three cloud priorities,” said Ruggero Contu, Research Director at Gartner. Mainstream services that address these priorities, including security information and event management (SIEM) and IAM, and emerging services offer the most significant growth potential. Emerging offerings are among the fastest-growing segments and include threat intelligence enablement, cloud-based malware sandboxes, cloud-based data encryption, endpoint protection management, threat intelligence and web application firewalls (WAFs).
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are driving growth as they are becoming increasingly aware of security threats. They are also seeing that cloud deployments provide opportunities to reduce costs, especially for powering and cooling hardware-based security equipment and data center floor space.
“The cloud medium is a natural fit for the needs of SMBs. Its ease of deployment and management, pay-as-you-consume pricing and simplified features make this delivery model attractive for organizations that lack staffing resources,” added Contu.
The enterprise sector is also driving growth as they realize the operational benefits derived from a cloud-based security delivery model.
“Cloud-based delivery models will remain a popular choice for security practices, with deployment expanding further to controls, such as cloud-based sandboxing and WAFs. The ability to leverage security controls that are delivered, updated and managed through the cloud — and therefore require less time-consuming and costly implementations and maintenance activities — is of significant value to enterprises,” said Contu.
