The unified threat management market (UTM) market is expected to rise $3.75bn in 2015 from $1.84bn in 2010, according to a new analysis from Frost & Sullivan.
The increase will be driven by the surging high-profile breaches and companies’ obligation to report them publicly that further motivates businesses to invest in sophisticated network security products such as UTM.
The report, Analysis of the Unified Threat Management Market and the Impact of Convergence, notes UTM integrates multiple security tools into a single network appliance, allowing businesses to deploy enterprise-grade security without the costs associated with multiple point products.
Frost & Sullivan research analyst Chris Rodriguez said for UTM vendors, the ability to address these novel threats will determine their success in the market.
"Innovative UTM vendors have developed new technologies capable of inspecting network traffic based on extensive contextual data such as application, user, time, device and location."
"This enables the UTM products to more effectively and accurately identify and block threats."
UTM products feature security technologies such as firewalls, virtual private network (VPN), intrusion prevention, anti-malware, spam filtering, web filtering and data leakage prevention.
Gartner noted many small businesses find tremendous value in this approach and UTM applications are now getting popular within enterprise organisations as well.
The report identified a marked shift toward converged security and networking functionalities like quality of service (QoS), Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), load balancing and mobile device management.
The research firm notes vendors must continue to develop capabilities to meet evolving business practices in order to combat many new threat vectors such as Web application vulnerabilities, as traditional security functions are unable to ward them off.
