The Framingham, Massachusetts-based research company claimed that worldwide information security services spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.9% to $23.5bn in 2007. This far outstrips the forecast growth of 6.7% of the IT services market which is expected to reach $490bn in 2007.
Managed security services are tipped to show particularly strong growth, but it is not necessarily cost-reductions that are driving clients towards handing over some of their security requirements to a third party. An example of this trend is UK retail bank Lloyds TSB, which announced a $2.6m, two-year contract with Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Unisys Corp for the services vendor to manage its intrusion detection service in February.
Bob Spencer, head of group IT security and risk at Lloyds TSB, said at this week’s Gartner IT Outsourcing event in London: We are under constant attack from viruses and hackers, and we don’t care whether or not we outsource or in-source our security requirements, as long as we protect the assets of our 16 million customers’ assets. Unisys’ service is cost neutral to the cost of running the service in house, but Unisys gives us access to specialist skills that we do not breed internally, as well as intelligence on potential attacks.
IDC also expects a growing demand for wireless and application security services including assessments, architecture design and implementation, as well as business continuity and disaster recovery as growth areas within security services. Allan Carey, program manager for information security services at IDC, said: Although numerous IT markets declined from 2001 to 2002, security spending remains a top priority in many organizations.
Source: Computerwire
