Due to rapid adoption of cloud computing by businesses, the data center and virtual security appliance market is expected to reach $4.4 billion by 2016, according to Infonetics Research.
The technology research firm reveals that Cisco is leading the data center and virtual security appliance market with nearly a third of global revenue in 2011, followed by Juniper, McAfee, HP, and Fortinet.
The firm added that there are a number of appliance vendors that are yet enter into the top 5. It is expected that these firms will have a strong position in data center security overall later this year, and others already in the top 5 will strengthen their positions.
Infonetics Research said that market incumbents such as McAfee, Trend Micro, Check Point, Arbor,Palo Alto, SonicWALL, and F5 will be growing at a rapid pace later this year.
“In the already big and growing data center security appliance segment, we see a potential battle looming for vendor market share,” said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.
As per infonetics, global sales of virtual security appliances that include VPNs/firewalls, SSL VPNs, IDS/IPS and content security gateways grew 57 percent from 2010 to 2011.
On the other hand, the larger data center security appliance market, including integrated security appliances, IDS/IPS, content security gateways and DDoS appliances, is forecast to grow 8.7 percent in 2012.
The firm expects that both these segments will observe good growth over the next 5 years.
The growth will be driven by the increasing volume and variety of security threats new security challenges being presented by cloud and virtualization technologies, service provider data center upgrades, and the cost and ineffectiveness of some traditional security solutions in data center environments.
Earlier, Infonetics Research predicted the virtual security appliance market to more than quadruple, to $1.75 billion during 2010 to 2015.
