Cloud computing security to grow in 2009
As I mentioned the other day, I've just completed a report with Osterman Research on the messaging security market. What we found will be good news for cloud computing providers.
While enterprise users continue to spend a large percentage of their workday involved with messaging activities, the Internet remains a dangerous place for users. Websense, for example, reported that 57 percent of attacks are delivered via the Web. Commtouch found that SPAM accounted for 72 percent of all email traversing the Internet in the first quarter of 2009.
At the same time, today's economic climate favors cost-effective solutions. IT expects to spend significantly less in 2009 than in 2008 on messaging. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents expected IT spending to be lower in 2009 versus 18 percent who made similar projections last year.
As such, while server-based solutions will continue to dominate the messaging security market, cloud-based solutions will constitute a growing percentage of purchases. The number of respondents who deployed hosted security services grew by nine percentage points since last year. Over the next 12 months hosted anti-spam services, such as those offered by Kaspersky, Trend Micro and more recently Microsoft, are also expected to show their greatest growth.
Comprehensive security solutions will be particularly hot over the next 12 months. Although the vast majority of enterprises today deal with separate vendors for their various best-of-breed solutions (71 percent), the number of respondents preferring a consolidated comprehensive centrally managed messaging security solution double while individual best of breed solutions dropped significantly (to 33 percent of respondents).
