Due to infrastructure and interface upgrades, many data center and cloud operators are planning serious spending on good old-fashioned firewalls; DDoS prevention systems are also a top priority, said Infonetics Research.
By 2015, nearly 2/3 of survey respondents will need firewalls that support between 100G and 499G, and another 30 percent anticipate needing over 500G.
For respondents deploying virtual security appliances, the drivers have shifted away from visibility and management functions to security.
Though operators are looking at the impact of SDN (software-defined networking) on security deployments, it is not yet heavily driving security spending.
Arbor, Cisco, Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet, and McAfee are viewed by operator respondents as key data center/cloud vendors, though there is no clear leader.
Infonetics Research survey said many respondents are also evaluating products from F5 and Palo Alto Networks.
Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research, said performance requirements driven by infrastructure upgrades and the increasing size and scale of attacks are prompting data center and cloud operators to invest in security solutions.
The survey noted that the primary concern among service providers operating data centers is getting the security infrastructure to match the performance of the network infrastructure.
The recent disclosures about the NSA stealing data from prominent data centers are causing a new wave of panic, forcing cloud and data center providers to feverishly shore up their networks and systems.
