Interest in cloud-based security services on the rise among SMBs

INDIA: Cloud-based security services will reach $5.9 billion in 2017, up 21 percent from 2016, according to Gartner. A strong demand from the Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) alongside enterprises will fuel this growth further. Gartner estimates the cloud-based security services market will reach close to $9 billion by 2020.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are driving growth as they are becoming increasingly aware of security threats. They are also seeing that cloud deployments provide opportunities to reduce costs, especially for powering and cooling hardware-based security equipment and data center floor space.

"The cloud medium is a natural fit for the needs of SMBs. Its ease of deployment and management, pay-as-you-consume pricing and simplified features make this delivery model attractive for organizations that lack staffing resources," said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

The enterprise sector is also driving growth as they realize the operational benefits derived from a cloud-based security delivery model. "The ability to leverage security controls that are delivered, updated and managed through the cloud — and therefore require less time-consuming and costly implementations and maintenance activities — is of significant value to enterprises," said Contu.

According to a global survey conducted by Gartner at the beginning of 2016, public cloud will be the prime delivery model for more than 60 percent of security applications by the end of 2017.

Email security, web security and identity and access management (IAM) remain organizations' top-three cloud priorities. Mainstream services that address these priorities, including security information and event management (SIEM) and IAM, and emerging services offer the most significant growth potential.

Emerging offerings are among the fastest-growing segments and include threat intelligence enablement, cloud-based malware sandboxes, cloud-based data encryption, endpoint protection management, threat intelligence and web application firewalls (WAFs).