Defying all menace of slowdown, the network security services market
continued to witness an exponential growth of over 60% in FY 2008-09. In the
past few years, network security services have been growing at double the pace
of products in the market. At present, system integration and consulting
services are the major contributors to the services revenue. With growing
awareness, FY 2009-10 may see the wide contribution of managed security,
compliance audits, and certification in the overall revenues.
According to VOICE&DATA research, the overall security services market stood
at Rs 739 crore in FY 2008-09 and grew to over 62%. The main contributors to
this astonishing figure were HCL Comnet, Datacraft, Fortinet, Wipro Infotech,
Sify, and Secure Synergy.
With over 14% market share, HCL Comnet emerged as a major player in the
segment. The company garnered an estimated revenue of Rs 105 crore. In FY
2008-09, the company signed a seven-year end-to-end IT services agreement with
National Insurance Company (NIC). The contract is valued at Rs 393 crore. Under
this agreement, HCL will be responsible for setting up and managing a new
enterprise wide IT landscape for NIC. This will cover business process
re-engineering, application blueprinting and rollout of nineteen applications,
systems integration and management services across data center, networks,
security and help desk services spanning over 1,034 branches and 10,000
end-users across the country.
Datacraft grabbed the second position with overall revenues of Rs 95 crore in
FY 2008-09. The company has been able to add many new clients over the last few
years. FSI, media & communication, manufacturing, travel and transportation, ITS
and ITeS continue to be its key verticals. The recent acceptance by shareholders
of Datacraft Asia for an offer by Dimension Data to purchase the remaining 44.9%
stake has strengthened its reach and made Datacraft a leading global IT
solutions and services provider. This will give Datacraft a strong competitive
position in the key markets across Asia. Also, Datacraft India would be able to
operate with more flexibility and leverage opportunities in India and abroad,
which in turn will accelerate growth in key markets.
The research indicates that company acquisitions, which enable the
convergence of two heterogeneous environments where the security services on the
network need tight integration, is the primary growth driver. Another area which
is creating the fear among corporate honchos is the growth in attack signatures
in terms of vulnerabilities, virus, etc.
Achieving a thumping growth of over 60% in FY 2008-09, Fortinet continued to
build its strong presence in the market. With estimated revenues of Rs 64 crore,
the company egressed as a third major player in the VOICE&DATA rankings. Its
current focus is on new technologies to fulfill growing security needs of its
clients and has some interesting projects with Delhi International Airport,
India's and Moon mission Chandrayaan.
While revenue of Wipro declined by 7%, Sify manged to figure first time in
the rankings. Sify is now fully operational as a long distance operator for
wholesale voice with a steady increase in business. The company won significant
contracts for data center services from General Insurance Corporation, State
Bank of India, and Vishal Group. It also signed connectivity engagements with
Canpack, HDFC SLIC, and Indian Overseas Bank.
Engineering Trends
According to VOICE&DATA estimates, the network security market is expected
to grow at a CAGR of over 40% in FY 2009-10. While the industry is still
witnessing demand for more customized solutions, Unified Threat Management (UTM)
and Unified Access Control (UAC) are also making their foray in an aggressive
manner. Also, there is a growing emphasis on simplified and one-stop solutions
to queer multiple types of threats, hence, avoiding the complexities of many
point products. Increased HSPDA, web 2.0 growth, and Wi-Fi availability have
made mobility pushed. Thus the industry is likely to witness new applications,
new application programming interfaces (APIs) and new levels of security
breaches. Experts are also anticipating an increas applications using 3G and
other mobile access methods.
With fears of increasing number of threats looming large, organizations are
becoming more and more careful and adopting proactive security strategies. They
are also shifting toward technologies used for providing BCP, DR, information
security controls, etc, by adopting them as precautionary and assurance based
measures against such threats. The industry is also construing an increased
adoption of standards like B525999 and ISO27001.
Among new products and services, SRX is the most notable launch by Juniper in
FY 2008-09. The platform has a capability to improve data center architecture by
earmarking network designers to break multiple layers into one. This platform
offers the flexibility to add security functionality as per requirement and can
scale from 1G to 100G on the same chassis.
Check Point is no stranger to IT security revolution. The company was one of
the first to launch commercial firewall, fifteen years ago. In February 2009,
Check Point introduced its Software Blade Architecture, which is a logical
security building block that can be centrally managed. Software Blades can be
quickly enabled and configured into a solution based on specific business needs.
And as needs evolve, additional blades can be quickly activated to extend
security to an existing configuration within the same hardware foundation.
The year gone by saw an increasing appearance of sophisticated threats and
growing complexity of infrastructure environment. This is burdening the in-house
IT departments to match the threat scenario.
Moreover, adherence to regulatory compliance is forcing the resource and
knowledge handicapped IT departments to look at outsourcing their security
operations.
Fortinet, another major player in this segment, launched a new vulnerability
management (VM) and compliance solution, FortiScan-1000B, for endpoint assets
including desktops and laptops as well as other network assets, such as servers.
It is targeted at mid to large enterprises and government entities.
FortiScan-1000B appliance will help organizations protect thousands of computing
assets by integrating various capabilities into a single device.
Similarly, HCL launched new services like anti-phishing, anti-malware
monitoring, managed endpoint security, and managed authentication. Moreover, it
has also worked with principles to integrate new solutions like data leak
prevention (DLP), network admission and access control (NAC), encryption, etc.
The last few years saw the emergence of sophisticated threats, which resulted
into the evolution of new technologies like DLP, NAC, encryption solution,
transaction level monitoring solution for BFSI segment, and federated identity
management to support large scale M&A in the industry. Also, services like anti-phishing,
anti-malware, integrated managed endpoint security, application and database
security monitoring, etc, are seeing momentum in the security market.
New Age Drivers
The network security market is undergoing a change that is marked mainly by
the integration of security appliances and solutions. Overall, the security
market is going to be driven by next generation security devices like 'Secure
Services Gateways'. The emerging new class of networking devices, known as
services gateways, combine the functionality of networking infrastructure
devices like routing and switching, and security applications like VPN,
firewall, anti-virus, IDS/IPS, content filtering, etc, onto a single platform.
BFSI segment is envisioning greater adoption of security services as compared to
IT/ITeS and the service provider segment. And SMBs have been steadily focusing
on integrated security appliances.
Enterprises would be dedicating huge resources to manage individual security
appliances. The IT staff would need to be trained on each user interface, with
different commands and settings for each device. It is imperative that a company
deploys a proven, reputable solution instead of a UTM device that has all the
right marketing keywords on the package. A UTM system is only part of a total
security infrastructure. In the past, enterprises were mostly engaged with
deployment of multiple security software programs, including a firewall,
anti-virus software, anti-spam appliance and URL gateway. Though these programs
and devices had their specific purposes, implementing so many separate systems
is not so cost effective as compared to UTM.
The IT infrastructure user market has become excessive cost sensitive to have
security demands. It is now paving way for low-cost outsourced services to
address security needs. The growth of virtualization and software as a service (SaaS)
is driving more and more organizations to offload their IT services to
outsourced vendors. Experts believe that the best bet to outsource would be the
service providers for their commitment on availability and dependent
infrastructure.
Not Plug and Play Anymore
Given the global meltdown and its aftermath, organizations are now espousing
every possible measure to avoid any additional embarrassment. Earlier, buying a
firewall was sensed to be the end to all security-related woes. However, that
perception is swiftly changing and organizations are devoting substantial time
for making blueprints to handle various aspects of security.
Concepts such as perimeter defense, intrusion management architecture, secure
branch office, secure IP telephony framework, etc, are gaining immense
importance while drafting security frameworks.
Among the key challenges, scarcity of trained network security professionals
has been a major issue. Because of this, many organizations are not outsourcing
their network security management and monitoring services. There is a strong
need to change this mentality and the onus is on the security professionals and
vendors, who must create more success stories to take this growth to new level.
Panorama 2009-10
Security always plays a crucial role in IT strategy, but overall it has been
a tough task for a CTO to rationalize the implementation budgets on it. In the
current bleak environment, companies are looking to spend only for the factual
demand and therefore, 2009-10 could see a strong call for customized and
scalable security solutions in India.
The SMB sector is also realizing that security is not just about implementing
the best-of-breed technology or purchasing boxes and putting them up. Rather, it
is an action that demands constant service support to work effectively. Also,
the increasing mobility of workforce, rapidly growing broadband adoption, and
the rising demand for IT-enabled enterprise solutions are resulting in a
continuous rise in the complexity of corporate network security. Considering
this, the industry is expected to witness the entry of some new global and
domestic players in FY 2009-10. It is expected that organizations are going to
consolidate their IT spend in 2009.
Considering the large number of SMEs still incapable of handling their
security needs, the network security services market is expected to continue
showing solid growth in the near future with further widening of security war
pectuses.
In 2009-10, organizations will concentrate more on web, hosted and data
security solutions. The need for data protection in the web 2.0 world and
creating awareness about web threats is expected to take the lead. Hence,
service inspections such as vulnerability assessment and testing will gain more
authority .
This increasing security cognizance will emphatically create demand and would
be the driving force for this industry. However, it must be remembered that this
growth can only be sustained if security domain experts are able to distinguish
between common needs and customized needs of organizations in the way they
conduct business.
Jatinder Singh
jatinders@cybermedia.co.in
Page(s) 1
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
