Security software vendors stand to make a killing throughout the rest of 2010 and into the middle of the decade.
As CIOUpdate reports, the scourge of new malware and cyber attacks targeting enterprises and consumers has propelled security applications to the top of most IT administrators’ priority list.
Gartner reports that the consumer security market will account for $4.2 billion in sales in 2010, up from $3.9 billion last year. Endpoint security applications and platforms for the enterprise will check in second at roughly $3 billion, up from $2.9 billion in 2009.
“During the next six to 12 months, products delivered as SaaS and appliances will continue overtaking traditional software licensing as the preferred purchasing methods,” Gartner analyst Matthew Cheung, said in the report. “Delivery as a suite in subsegments such as enterprise endpoint security, identity and access management (IAM), and Web security will be the most prevalent product delivery types.”
Worldwide security software sales are expected to surge another 11 percent this year, a fact that should come as absolutely no surprise to enterprise IT administrators wrestling with a constant barrage of new and more sophisticated pieces of malware on a daily basis.
Gartner’s latest forecast calls for new security software sales in excess of $16.5 billion, up from $14.8 billion last year. And last year’s record haul represented only a 7 percent increase, a testament to both the impact the macroeconomic downturn had on most enterprise IT budgets and the relative value companies continue to place on locking down their data networks.
“Most segments of the security software market will continue to grow over the next few years, although a significant degree of variation is expected between the more-established and less-mature technologies,” Gartner analyst Ruggero Contu, said in the report. “Overall, security will remain one of the fastest-growing areas within the enterprise software market.”
