Security is a business that welcomes bad news. Whenever a new virus is discovered, hackers penetrate some corporate firewall or a hapless employee publishes a database, it’s the security pro that gets the call to clean up the mess and safeguard against a repeat incident.
Increasingly, businesses are turning to managed security service providers to help protect them against the myriad threats. Complexity of the threats as well as the protection systems means businesses simply cannot afford to keep up with their own in-house resources, and this pushed the managed security services market to a record $13 billion in sales in 2012, according to analyst firm Infonetics Research.
“Buyers are moving to managed security services to deal with increased attack volume and complexity, manage security product sprawl, deliver consistent security for a distributed workforce and device population, and provide security for cloud infrastructure,” said Infonetics principal analyst Jeff Wilson.
Managed security services grew 12 percent in 2012, and is expected to grow another 69 percent over the next five years – pushing the total market close to $20 billion.
Interesting is what managed security services means today and what it will mean in 2017.
The majority of managed service support is delivered as customer premises equipment support, the remote monitoring and management of firewalls, intrusion prevention, antivirus and other systems. As many businesses – particularly enterprises – have already heavily in legacy infrastructure, it only makes sense that their foray into managed services would be outsourcing management to a third party.
The increasing availability of hosted and cloud-based managed security services means businesses will start shifting their security spend away from traditional on-premises equipment. Infonetics predicts CPE-based security services will fall off by as much as 50 percent over the next five years.
Security services are a mainstay of the channel’s managed services segment. Most managed security today comes in the form of CPE-based services. Increasingly, though, solution providers are adopting cloud-based resources as a means for avoiding the expense of developing service-supporting infrastructure.
Cloud-based security could make a huge difference in the ability of solution providers to capitalize on managed services opportunities. By lowering the barriers to entry, cloud security will enable more solution providers to offer entry-level to complex security services to their customers. The result will be an expansion of the total addressable market and accelerated growth.
