Why Cloud Radically Changes The Face Of The Security Market

When does a shift create new market? When you have to develop new products, sell them to different people than before who serve different roles, have a different value proposition for your solutions, and they’re sold with different pricing and profitability models – well, that in my view is a different market.

Cloud represents such a disruption for security. And it’s going to be a $1.5 billion market by 2015. I discuss the nature of this trend and its implications in my latest report, “Security And The Cloud”.

Most of the discussion about cloud and security solutions has been about security SaaS: the delivery model for security shifting from on-premise to cloud-based. That’s missing the forest for the trees. Look at how the rest of IT (which is about 30 times the size of the security market) is moving to the cloud. What does that mean in terms of how we secure these systems, applications, and data? The report details how the security market will change to address this challenge and what we’re seeing of that today.

Vendors have finally started to come to market with solutions, though as you’ll see from the report, we’re still at the early stages with far more to go. And developing solutions for cloud environments requires a lot more than scaling up and supporting multi-tenancy. But heightened pressure by cloud customers and prospects is fueling the rapid evolution of solutions. How rapid and radical an evolution? By 2015, security will shift from being the #1 inhibitor of cloud to one of the top enablers and drivers of cloud services adoption.

Yet most important of all is what this means in terms of market disruption: for security vendors, in what you will sell and how you will reach your enterprise customers through these providers rather than direct or through traditional channels; and for cloud providers in what the revenue opportunities are for selling security solutions as part of your services in addition to adopting them for defensive purposes. Anyone not bracing for this change – and embracing it – faces significant business risk.

For more detail, please read the report. I welcome your comments.