Asia-Pacific content security growth to more than double in 2010

MALAYSIA: The Asia-Pacific secure content management (SCM) market is forecasted to grow by 15.4 percent in 2010 - from just 6.3 percent in 2009 - with revenues rising to $522 million by the end of the year.

Frost & Sullivan industry manager Edison Yu expects growth to be driven by the continued migration to a services platform in a bid by enterprises to control costs.

“Businesses are rapidly seeing the upside in the services approach,” he says. “Content security, particularly e-mail filtering, has proven to be a suitable ‘poster-technology’ for security services since diverting e-mails to a third-party vendor for security scans is generally perceived as having no direct tangible effect on end-user experience.

“In truth, the ability for such [e-mail security] services to offer enterprises with ‘spam-free’ bandwidth is enticing from an operational, productivity and cost perspective,” Yu adds.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Asia-Pacific Secure Content Management Market, finds that the market - covering 14 Asia-Pac countries, including Japan - will grow at a CAGR of 18.4 percent (2009-2016), to clock revenues of just under $1.5 billion by end-2016.

E-mail filtering services, which accounted for about 59 percent ($265.1 million) of the total content security market in 2009, are expected to see a compounded growth of 15.8 percent annually from now till 2016; while Web security services will record a CAGR of 21.5 percent in that same period.

According to Yu, the need for companies to secure their Web gateways has risen in prominence in the last two years with the growing adoption of Web technologies. “The rapid emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the importance of the Web sphere in driving business processes saw companies placing greater emphasis on securing their Web fronts beyond just the traditional URL filtering,” he says.

He expects Web security services to gain hugely in the coming years, with more converged services encompassing anti-malware, application control, data protection and such being added into the mix of solutions offered by security vendors.

Yu also adds that technology convergence will drive the integration of content security provisioning across both e-mail and Web security, as well as integration with other compatible technologies such as data loss protection or network security.

“The ability for content security vendors to offer extensive portfolios of solutions across both e-mail and Web security, along with options for converged platforms, will be key in enhancing their competitiveness in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace,” Yu says. “This is especially valuable as enterprises look for defense-in-depth, with simpler management and lower costs.”