Threat Intelligence Market to Reach $905 Million by 2014, Says IDC

More Formidable Security Threats and High-Profile Attacks Drive Enterprise Demand for Security Intelligence Services

Research from International Data Corporation (IDC) on the threat intelligence market, a sector made up of advanced security event monitoring and management technologies that incorporate a variety of threat-related information sources to develop predictive security, predicts the market to grow from $198 million in 2009 to $905 million in 2014.

A continually evolving breed of unknown, persistent, targeted, and adaptive security threats is pushing businesses’ enterprise IT/Security infrastructure to their limits and driving the expansion of the security services threat intelligence market as organizations struggle to keep pace, says IDC.

Emerging Web application and other difficult-to-detect attacks are changing the security protection landscape, IDC says. “To ensure that enterprise network, application, data, and endpoints can remain secure (clean of malware and breaches), anti-malware products and services are evolving to deal with these threats and reducing reliance on general signatures by instead adopting other forms of detection,” the report notes.

Highlights from IDC’s security services threat intelligence research include:

• Many organizations, despite having implemented some of the more standard countermeasures (i.e., firewalls, antivirus, IDs) still do not have visibility across their environment to understand what is happening at any given time.

• Attacks are becoming shorter (lasting less than a couple of hours or only a few minutes) and more highly targeted (e.g., specific URL, person, company, or IT asset), further complicating detection, mitigation, and remediation.

• Signature-based tools (antivirus, firewalls, and intrusion prevention) are only effective against 30–50% of current security threats.

• Security services threat intelligence products and services grew 65% year over year in North America from 2010 to 2011 as enterprises looked to proactively monitor and mitigate malicious network traffic.

• Over the past five years, attackers have enlarged their scope to include commercial SMBs offering high-value targets (e.g., financial information, intellectual property, and other proprietary data).

“Businesses are struggling to protect themselves as these outside threats become more resistant to signature-based security tools,” said Christine Liebert, senior analyst, Security Services. “It’s becoming clear that many of these emerging threats cannot be defended against in-house, creating a shift in security posture toward being more proactive.”

Related: Intelligence Sharing Key in Cybersecurity Arms Race, Experts Say