Cloud Security Vendors Poised for Growth

Posted by Lauren Ellis on October 6th, 2014

Security services have seen advances in identity and access management services; however, encryption services are lagging in the security industry. According to Gartner, revenues for identity and access management (IAM), remote vulnerability assessment, security information and event management are expected to reach $4.13 billion by 2017.

Gartner sees this growth coming from small to mid-sized businesses as they begin to utilize cloud services and adopt cloud-based security services over the next few years. Their “Market Trends: Cloud-based Security Services Market, Worldwide, 2014,” report suggest that certain market segments will see sales increases and annual growth as the need for cloud security vendors grows.

Secure email gateway services are the biggest market today according to Gartner, and that by the end of 2014 this service will result in about $800 million in revenues. A figure that is predicted to increase to $942 million in 2015 and by 2017 it is expected to top $1 billion. This segment is expected to have lower annual growth than other security services such as IAM.

IAM appears to have significant growth opportunities. While the current year might result in approximately $500 million, it is expected to balloon to $860 million in 2015 and then increase by 28.3% in 2017 to $1.24 billion. Within the authentication management segment, Gartner also predicts that this growth will come mostly from “multifunction identity as a service (IDaaS).”

Administration and account provisioning, authentication, authorizing and reporting are all function of IDaaS services. Managing software as a service (SaaS) applications and internal applications are within the scope of cloud based IAM. Some of the more successful IAM vendors have been cited by Gartner to include Atos, CA Technologies, Exostar, Fischer International, Identropy, Ilantus Technologies, Lighthouse Security Group, Mycroft, Intel, Okta, OneLogIn, Ping Identity, RSA Symantec, Symplified, Sena Systems, Simeio Solutions, Verizon and Wipro.

Interest in cloud-based security has been driven largely by small and medium sized businesses and their need to improve their IAM functions according to Gartner’s report. They need to serve employees who access internal Web-architected applications and SaaS. According to analysts Ruggero Contu and Kelly Kavanagh, “An increasing number of organizations seem to be adopting cloud-based IAM services to replace IAM on-premises tools. Larger businesses are often looking to use IAM as a mixture of legacy- and Web-architected cloud and on premises applications.”

One notable company that has entered the market for cloud-based IAM includes the language learning company Rosetta Stone. This company serves individuals, businesses and schools. George Hegedus, director of enterprise services confirms that Rosetta Stone moved to the Okta cloud-based single sign-on (SSO) service. The company will utilize this to serve its 1,700 employees. Rosetta Stone was driven to using cloud-based SSO from Box, Google, Concur and Workday and Salesforce. Hegedus commented, ““We were lucky to be able to align our Okta implementation with our cloud applications.”

Employees benefit from cloud-based SSO because there are fewer passwords to remember and password management and provisioning is easier on the IT department according to Heeds. The cloud-based SSO was an advantage over on-premises SSO solutions because the company was already adopting cloud applications.

The Gartner report suggests that cloud-based services are expected to be a “new area of growth.” However, there are some issues with providers that have a lack of interest in cloud-based encryption. This has created an environment within organizations where encryption has become an increasingly complex activity requiring proprietary solutions that tend to be overly complex. This complexity opens up the market for cloud security brokers that can attain easy deployments of encryption services as well as a suite of on-site solutions for encryption management.

Author :
Lauren Ellis is a research analyst covering the technology industry’s top trends & topics, focusing on Cloud Security Vendors, Cloud Computing, Data Loss Prevention etc.,