The cloud security services market grew 13.5% in 2014 to $7.2bn worldwide, up from $6.3bn the previous year, says Infonetics Research.
"Our long-term outlook for the already very large cloud and CPE (Customer-premises equipment) managed security services market, especially for cloud services, is quite strong as providers begin to leverage their software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) rollouts to really scale the delivery of managed security services," said Jeff Wilson, research director for cybersecurity technology.
"Providers are leaning heavily on SDN and the promise of NFV, and this will help them deliver a wide range of new security services that leverage virtual appliances for protecting applications, data and infrastructure in their own clouds, and delivering new services to customers," Wilson said.
Managed security service revenue totalled $15.8bn worldwide in 2014, rising 10% from 2013. Cloud-based offerings made up 46% of security service revenue in 2014, with CPE-based services contributing 54%. By 2018, Infonetics/IHS expects cloud security services to surpass CPE-based security services.
The largest contributor to cloud-based security service revenue is content security, followed by managed firewall services, other security services, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation and intrusion detection/prevention systems.
