In an interview with Biztech2.0, Neenu S Kumar, Research Analyst, ICT Practice, India and South East Asia, Frost & Sullivan talks about the landscape of the integrated security appliances market in India.

What are the latest trends in the integrated security appliances market?

The shift in the SMB sector towards an Internet enabled business model and the expansion of large enterprises setting up new branches, is leading to the adoption of integrated security appliances. Integrated security appliances are witnessing high penetration from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. It offers features such as firewall, VPN, anti-virus, anti Spam, IDS and IPS. Besides, it also has features such as content filtering, virtualisation, URL filtering and routing.

As a recent trend, the UTM appliance also inspects all network traffic and does identity management as well. The UTM appliances with high throughput is witnessing acceptance among various large enterprises at their branch offices and data centres. The Integrated security appliance market for the first 3 quarters of 2007 was $ 31.6 million. The total market size for FY 2007 is expected to cross $ 40 million. As we are yet to finalise our Q4 research, we can provide only an estimate of the total market size of 2007. Virtualisation technologies have already been incorporated in UTM devices, enabling administrators to assign different 'virtual' UTM devices to different network segments or user groups. The entire system can then be managed through a single interface. Virtualisation essentially simulates the presence of multiple devices on the network, without the overhead and complexity of physically doing so.

What is your opinion on the convergence of technologies in this space?

The major trend, which the IT security market is witnessing and which is expected to extend, further in this space is the convergence of technologies. The most significant among such kind of convergence is security and networking and integrated security appliances. In the past two years there has been a remarkable sale of Firewalls and VPN modules sold along with Routers and Switches by the infrastructure equipment vendors, which helped them enjoy a significant share in the network security appliance market. Integrated security appliance is another major trend moving forward, which is especially catering to the demand of small and medium enterprises, as well as branch offices of large enterprises. The convergence breeze of information of security is definitely expected to prolong further.

Large enterprises and service providers will prefer only stand-alone security appliances for their head quarters and central offices, but for their branch offices, they have started considering high-end integrated security appliances (those with higher through put) and more such spending will be witnessed in the coming years. However the large enterprises, which are the source of big-ticket orders, still perceive integrated security appliances as an option. No matter how strong the integrated security adoption wave may be, the transition from point security solution to integrated solution will be struck till the middle level enterprises and the branch office level of large enterprises. The transition is unlikely to happen in the large enterprises space.

Your suggestions to large enterprises that are planning to deploy integrated security solutions at their core network infrastructure?

Integrated security appliances come with multiple security features. As more enterprises look to simplify their infrastructure management, they will look for all-in-one security appliances to ease their management burden. In the UTM market, more enterprises from different verticals are adopting this technology. Few vendors have reported the deployment of their UTM appliances in the enterprise class segment with high throughput and low latency, in areas such as the headquarters of many businesses and also at their data centres. But in few cases it was seen that the UTM deployment, supplemented stand-alone security appliances, which the large enterprises had deployed. The main reason behind the lack of sole dependence on UTM is due to the fact that UTMs give rise to a single point of failure. Another reason, which was cited by large enterprise respondents, was that UTM devices still don’t have many features, which can give; layered protection and companies have to re-invest for additional features to improve their security infrastructure.

Which verticals have been early adopters of integrated security appliances in India?

Any SMB, which is in the forefront of adopting an Internet driven business model can be considered as an early adopter of integrated security appliances, irrespective of the vertical. Manufacturing, IT/ITes, education and healthcare verticals enjoy a prominent share in this category. Late adopters, I feel will be banks and service providers, which deploy UTM solutions at their branch offices.