Worldwide security spending tops $19 billion

Globally small and medium business Security Market (on-premise and cloud) spend is expected to experience an overall compounded annual growth rate of over 10% for the period of 2011 through 2016.

Cloud security services currently accounts for nearly 17% of this total spending and is projected to increase to 24% by 2016, according to AMI Partners. The soon to be published 2012 Global SMB Security Market Assessment explores the market opportunities that are and will be available to security vendors worldwide.

Security is of intensifying concern for all small and medium business (SMBs, companies with less than 1000 employees) decision makers. The key drivers for this concern and for adoption of cloud-based security services in particular, come from a number of factors:

• Proliferation of mobile devices, both officially purchased company-sanctioned devices and employees’ own devices being used for both private and work related activities (BYOD “Bring-your-own device”) are significantly heightening security risk exposure which is becoming unmanageable for SMBs.
• Employees also want to use devices to access and disseminate company data in the same way they do in their private lives through a variety of social media.
• Keeping abreast of security on all these devices is a major challenge for SMB ICT management teams – where they exist.
• Weak prevailing economic conditions & capital expenditure restraints mean that the Cloud payment model offers a better way of procuring sophisticated ICT solutions, and keeping them up-to-date and “state of the art”.

“Security is a complex issue with rapidly changing permutations. Widespread lack of technical resources and expertise is leading to an increasing desire to outsource the problem amongst small and medium businesses,” comments Hugh Gibbs, VP Research for EMEA and report author. “This is presenting major opportunities for managed service solutions – particularly for skilled, local channel partners and managed security service providers (MSSPs).”

To take advantage of the myriad of opportunities in the dynamic SMB market security vendors will need to deploy viable solutions and will require vendor recognition of the following critical success factors:

• Easy to deploy Cloud service offerings within attractively-priced service bundles. Bundling increases potential service uptake by a factor of 4 or 5 AMI research shows.
• Availability through different channels including cloud-enabled local channel partners, service providers and retail/e-tail stores.
• Promotion through multiple information sources and communication channels both traditional and web based social media.