IDC: Asia's security software market to thrive in 2011
The Asia-Pacific security software market is poised for healthy growth this year, a new report has revealed.
Spending on security software in the Asia-Pacific excluding Japan region in 2011 will reach US$1.75 billion and post strong double-digit growth in most economies, according to an IDC statement released Tuesday. This includes expenditure on secure content and threat management (SCTM), security and vulnerability management (SVM), and identity and access management (IAM) products.
The market analyst expects the market to further grow to around US$2.4 billion by 2014, with SCTM forming the bulk of security software purchases.
IDC attributed the rise in security software spend to increasingly sophisticated threats and management overheads each organization and user face. Web applications, it added, also lead to information leakage risks as an overwhelming volume of personal and confidential information interact and collaborate together via Web applications.
"The security landscape has been constantly seeing new threats growing exponentially in terms of complexity," said Marco Lam, research analyst for security research at IDC Asia-Pacific, in the statement. "The malicious attacks included exploiting the vulnerabilities of applications and operating systems, insider sabotages and purloining, identity fraud and unauthorized access to corporate systems and networks. The ways of committing these misdeeds are ever changing."
IDC forecasts the SVM and IAM markets will be the two fastest growing security software segments across the region as companies seek to reduce complexity and increase management efficiency as well as generate better reports for monitoring their security posture and audits.
The need for regulatory compliance will also drive the SVM segment, it said. The segment is set enjoy the biggest growth in 2011, going up 13 percent year-on-year to hit US$141.8 million.
Spending on IAM is predicted to jump 12.5 percent over 2010 to reach US$371.5 million this year, driven by a continued focus on remote access, IDC added. Another contributing factor is the astonishing growth of social media usage which places a burden on a company's IT resources allocation--organizations will seek to better handle this dynamic using proper identity access management.
The SCTM market, according to IDC, will achieve year-on-year growth of 10.5 percent to register US$1.2 billion.
Moving forward, IDC expects companies to tap cloud computing for controlling management overheads in the security software market with businesses adopting security-as-a-service for automation and centralized management.
The growing number of data privacy ordinances in the region will also lead to a greater number of organizations implementing more security software to protect their data and rights, it added.