As companies are digitized more and more, vulnerability is also growing. Today, cyber criminals can buy crime as a packaged service, for example in the form of extortion software, so-called ransomware. Corporate espionage, fraud and congestion attacks are real risks for all organizations.
This may seem like a dark trend, but it also means that the demand for cyber security is constantly high – and growing. Analysis company IDC has just released its latest report on the digital security equipment market – the Security Appliance Tracker – and during the fourth quarter of last year sales for these products increased by 9.4 percent compared to the corresponding quarter the previous year.
This means that IT security equipment was traded for $ 4.8 billion during the quarter.
Looking at sales of the number of units, this increased by 21 percent to 1.3 million units.
Pete Finalle, senior analyst for security products at IDC, says growth grew further in the fourth quarter.
Sees strong regional trends
– Globally, the driving force at the moment is UTM, unified threat management (a single security solution that includes features such as antivirus protection, spam and spyware, network firewalls and data leak protection). But we also see strong regional trends driving the growth of firewalls, especially in Asia and the Middle East.
And while Sweden is often talked about as the united security solutions that protect against the threats of various kinds, it was the traditional firewall market that grew most strongly globally during the fourth quarter, IDC notes in this report.
However, Unified threat management is the largest segment with 57.1 per cent of the entire security equipment market. There, growth was 5.8 percent in one year.
The categories of web security and message security also show strong signs of growth, with growth of 6.8 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively.
The only categories where growth was less in the fourth quarter compared to a year earlier were intrusion detection, hybrid VPN and IPSec-VPN. In total, however, VPN sales remained quiet during the period – when positive growth for SSL-VPN compensated for the other parts.
In the fourth quarter, the five largest suppliers in the safety equipment market were the following (bracket market share) according to IDC:
- Cisco (15,8 %)
- Palo Alto Networks (13,4 %)
- Fortinet (11,0 %)
- Check Point (9,4 %)
- Symantec (3,8 %)
