A Datamonitor report reveals that enterprise investment in managed security services will soar.
Datamonitor’s new report, Security management solutions: making security effective reveals that although enterprises have accepted the need for security technologies, they are unprepared for the strain that the management of such solutions places on overwhelmed IT departments. A recent survey of large corporates found that just 16% employed a dedicated security expert to oversee the management of the network, suggesting that many companies are left hopelessly vulnerable.
However, managed solutions service providers (MSSP) are here to help, offering everything from full management to simple configuration. One option that is proving popular is that enterprises can still dictate what policies need to be implemented. Strong levels of competition are already visible within the MSSP market.
While many companies are aware of the need to implement firewalls, some are unable to successfully configure and reconfigure the devices when necessary. Third party security firms have discovered that up to 80% of firewalls in some corporates are poorly configured.
As a result enterprises will look to outsource some degree of their firewall configuration. Investment by enterprises on managed firewall solutions is expected to increase dramatically from $550m to an estimated $1.8bn by 2006. The managed firewall market will form the majority of MSSP revenues.
Many solution providers are also partnering up with insurance companies to offer their customers reductions on cyber risk policies. At present this only likely to be of interest to customers of those insurance firms and is by not one of the key influencing factors as to the choice of MSSP. But it is likely to become more significant in the future especially as the two-step protection process gets underway.
Many companies have already begun to increase spending on IT security. The next logical step would be to look toward insuring digital assets and the means of their production through the uptake of cyber risk policies.
