The cloud-based security services market is expected to reach $4.2 billion by 2016, according to a Gartner report.
By 2015, 10 per cent of the overall IT security enterprise product capabilities will be delivered in the cloud, the research and analyst firm said.
The services are also driving changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas such as secure e-mail and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).
"Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly," said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner.
"This shift in buying behaviour from the more traditional on-premises equipment towards cloud-based delivery models offers good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities, but those without such capabilities need to act quickly to adapt to this competitive threat,” Ahlm added.
A survey in January on security spending shows high demand from security buyers for cloud-based security service offerings. Security buyers from the US and Europe, representing a cross section of industries and company sizes, stated that they plan to increase the consumption of several common cloud services during the next 12 months.
The highest-consumed cloud-based security service is e-mail security services, with 74 per cent of respondents rating this as the top service.
Furthermore, 27 per cent of the respondents indicated they were considering deploying tokenisation as a cloud service. Gartner believes regulatory compliance measures to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), for example, are driving much of the growth of interest in tokenisation as a service.
As a service, tokenisation allows security buyers to avoid having to house personally identifiable information or other confidential information. The service allows organisations to remove tokenised systems from being considered "in scope" for PCI compliance, thus removing the burden of regulating the environment.
Another area that is likely to experience high growth is security information and event management (SIEM) as a service. Much of the interest is attributed to regulatory compliance concerns and security buyers' need to reduce costs in the area of log management, compliance reporting and security event monitoring. However, many customers in the enterprise segment will remain cautious about sending sensitive log information to cloud services, and this will continue to be an important aspect for security-as-a-service providers to address.