Market Overview: IT Security In 2009

The big news for the IT security market in 2009 is that it will fare relatively well. Cost and justification pressures are exerting themselves, but through increasing business-level visibility led by data-breach headlines, security spend continues to rise and take a growing share of overall IT spend. Security initiatives will focus on four things: protecting data, streamlining costly or manually intensive tasks, providing security for an evolving IT infrastructure, and both understanding and properly managing IT risks within a more comprehensive enterprise framework. The focus on efficiently delivering security to support business and IT initiatives will drive organizations to shift their purchasing behaviors. While the largest standalone security vendors remain strong within the threat-management market categories and small vendors continue to proliferate, we will see a new breed of security gorillas delivering business and IT services and solutions for which security is imbedded. As such, the most successful vendors will expand their capabilities — directly or through partnerships — and most effectively blur the lines between security product, managed security service (MSS), and consulting.