Gartner: Enterprises rethink software security strategies

Businesses are rethinking risk management and software security strategies, according to new research from Gartner, which shows four key developments - use of advanced analytics, expanding ecosystems, SaaS adoption and the prospect of punitive regulation.

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"The security market is changing as enterprises are rapidly transitioning to cloud-based digital business and technology models that are changing the way risk and security functions deliver value to organizations," said Gartner analyst Deborah Kish in a statement. "At the same time, the increase in threats and security incidents is creating a demand for security technology and innovation."

The report states that by 2020, advanced security analytics will be embedded in at least 75% of security products. Enterprises are increasingly demanding products that use “smarter” predictive and prescriptive analytics technologies. These technologies help alert users to potential security incidents and provide guidance on the best response.

A host of underlying technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, are driving advances in analytics capabilities, and Gartner says successful vendors will work with users to understand the value analytics can provide and increase use cases for security personnel and resources.

Security M&A

Gartner said that due to the large number of startups, the integration of small vendors through security, acquisition, integration and innovation is an effective way to increase market share and enter new markets.

In many cases, mature manufacturers seeking continued growth will acquire fast-growing companies from emerging related markets in order to quickly seize emerging markets.

Deborah Kish said: "There have been a number of corporate M&A events in the past year and a half, such as HPE's acquisition of Niara, Sophos's acquisition of Invincea and Barricade 10, IBM's acquisition of Agile 3, Splunk's acquisition of Caspida for UEBA, Palo Alto's acquisition of CyberLight, Forcepoint's acquisition of Imperva's Skyfence product, Cisco's acquisition of Cloudlock and Symantec's purchase of BlueCoat, which had acquired two CASB vendors Elastica and Perspecsys before being acquired, and Fortinet's acquisition of AccelOps to enter the SIEM field. These acquisitions have attracted the attention of analysts."

Vendors optimize profits by consolidating similar products under a single brand, thereby expanding market size by combining core functions such as development, support, sales, and marketing.

"Symantec would be a prime example of a cloud security company that has consolidated its security offerings and is growing rapidly, and BlueCoat grew 17 percent in 2015," Kish said.

The growth of SaaS

The report notes that as users of security products transition to digital business models, they are showing a preference for service models, including risk management and security software as a service.

This is in response to another recent survey, which found that software as a service (57%) and security as a service (51%) were ranked as the two leading cloud computing models widely adopted by enterprises.

Despite the industry shift toward software and security as a service, providers must consider the financial implications of maintaining support for legacy security products while investing in service offerings or managed services.

"If a vendor's revenue model is traditional hardware, it must support hardware products during the transition to business-based offerings," Kish said. "Many users will continue to leverage hardware-based offerings, in part to leverage existing investments, because they cannot yet fully trust new features or cloud-based software products that may never use cloud-based offerings on-premises. Our recommendation is that vendors transition to cloud services as quickly as possible to avoid the high cost of supporting two different delivery models for a long time."