Cloud-based MSS to gain traction across organizations due to scalability & cost-efficiency and offering considerable competitive advantage over their rivals
In the backdrop of complex and emerging threat landscape, managing cybersecurity has increasingly become a mounting concern for organizations of all sizes. Many organizations, especially small & medium business with limited IT budget struggle to address the issues that affect their IT security. Over few years, managed security services model in cybersecurity is gaining fast traction led by factors such as emergence of cloud based services and rising BYOD culture and rapidly growing remote workforce that need access to organizational data to conduct their day-to-day work processes. SMBs especially consider managed security services as a game-changer market to gain a competitive advantage over their bigger rivals. Simply put, managed security services (MSS) can be considered as a systematic approach in managing an enterprise’s security needs, and is outsourced to a service provider, leading to an efficient identity and access management for organizations.
Key drivers & growth opportunities
Growing concerns about email security, VPN and web services along with many organizations shifting to BYOD era have led to the imminent need for managed security services. MSS providers offer numerous benefits to the clients: the advantage of constant upgrades, helping in conducting of safe and fast security audits, timely assessments, management of firewalls and 24 by 7 monitoring activities. The model is gaining prominence since it can save a large part of client capital spent on procuring the massive hardware equipment and instead spend it on boosting their operational budgets. The market has witnessed many smart portable devices that enable data transfer via non –wired or cellular connection and has resulted in constant threats to enterprises. MSS offer a range of services to mitigate potential threats with considerable ease. As per a recent report by Allied Market Research titled “World Managed Security Services Market - Opportunities and Forecasts, 2013 – 2020, the managed security services market size would reach $29.9 billion by 2020 and is forecast to grow at 15.8% CAGR during the 2014 -2020 forecast period.
Cloud – based security services segment gaining prominence in MSS market
MSS can be either on – premise or cloud – based security services; cloud based services has emerged as a prominent strategy, mainly for large organizations handling huge volumes of data on a daily basis. Cloud security is no longer a challenge for these organizations and have positively impacted the policy makers favoring cloud based services across regions. Cloud – based MSS enable easy access to specialized tools along with an arsenal of traditional security measures including event management (SIEM), identity access management (IAM), network forensics, cloud security and endpoint management and others. And all this at amortized costs spread out over multiple customers from the MSSP's end. Furthermore, cloud-based services enable businesses in general to shift their IT security expenses to OPEX from CAPEX, offering benefits such as scalability, affordability and ease of upgrades–factors that offer competitive advantage to these organizations. Encryption products offered by various vendors would market demand of cloud-based MSS, due to numerous access management enhancing capabilities. Thus, cloud –based security market would dominate the remotely monitored user premise equipment (CPE) MSS.
Key market players for MSS including majors such as IBM Corporation, HP, Cisco Systems Inc., Dell SecureWorks and AT&T are actively making collaborations and acquiring target companies to expand their service portfolio. Geographically, North America dominates the MSS market and would continue to do over the forecast period, in terms of market size by value.
