SaaS now driving the content security market

Appliances and traditional software once led the way - now it is cloud software

Sales of SaaS offerings as a subset of the global content security gateway and software market grew 38 per cent in revenue terms in the year ending in September.

The figures are from US researcher Infonetics, which crunches the numbers for content security gateway solutions worldwide, breaking them down by technology type. The rest of the market expanded sales by only 4.6 per cent in the year.

Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics, said the product market for content security gateway offerings overall is looking "fairly flat" for the next two years.

"The SaaS business is showing strong growth. We are forecasting global SaaS revenue to more than double from 2013 to 2018, from just over $600m (£382.7m) to nearly $1.4bn in 2018," Wilson said.

SaaS was enabling the deployment of hybrid environments that offered benefits while retaining the advantages of traditional products such as appliances or packaged software.

"In some cases, companies seek a true hybrid solution with integrated management. And in others, hybrid environments grow organically. In any case, the opportunity to sell true hybrid solutions exists, and the growth potential is explosive," he said.

Infonetics said Q3 revenues for content security constituted 64 per cent of appliance sales and 36 per cent from software. Blue Coat was the leading vendor in growth terms, posting nine per cent revenue growth quarter on quarter.

SaaS, appliance, and traditional software offerings analysed by Infonetics include those focused on messaging as well as web security.