Friday, March 30, 2001

Where Internet Security Investment Dollars Will Go in 2001

According to the Report titled, "Where the Investment Dollars Will Go in 2001: The Top Seven Wonders of the Internet Security World," the Yankee Group identifies new markets, the metamorphosis of existing markets, and the maturation and resurrection of legacy environments.

Matthew Kovar, CFA, director of the Yankee Group's Security Solutions & Services Planning Service stated, "The Yankee Group has scoured the security industry to identify what are going to be the most prevalent trends for investment in the network security industry for 2001. We believe that these trends will be the driver of in excess of a hundred investment banking activities over the next twelve months."

According to the Yankee Group, the most prevalent security industry trends include:

1. Security service switches will emerge as a new class of carrier-based network equipment to deliver a range of value-added services to enterprise customers.

2. The secure content delivery market will take off based on the need to persistently control and secure digital content, creating new opportunities for security and communications vendors. This results in a market for secure content delivery technologies that the Yankee Group predicts will take off and surpass $200 million in 2001 and grow to over $2 billion by 2005.

3. The managed security service provider market will exceed $2.6 billion by 2005, as new-aged managed service providers looking to fuse the needs of e-commerce, Web hosting, IP VPNs, and managed security services will lead this new market.

4. New security market emerges for remote end-point security as part of IP VPNs, providing remote end-point security (REPS) as managed service providers roll out services to protect the remote workers' systems when they use their computers to access the Internet.

5. Security intelligence service providers blossom to capture a $1 billion market as it emerges to make adaptive network security management a proactive process, breaking through network securities' current reactive process, by allowing users to get out in front of the hackers that are trying to infiltrate IT systems.

6. Security management systems emerge and converge with network management platforms. As of 2000, security management platforms could trace their roots to managed security consulting organizations— which realized all the time and effort they had put into their systems— to effectively manage a range of security products. These products represented an investment of intellectual capital that could easily be commercialized and provided as a solution for managed security service providers.

7. Biometrics go mainstream by moving out of the labs and past government installations to become a mainstream technology for strong user authentication over IP networks, and the Yankee Group predicts it will become a widely deployed technology by late 2001 or early 2002.

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