After human resources, finance and accounting and supply chain management, large corporations and government agencies are turning to outside contractors for security.
Owing to the increased security threats, enterprises will outsource 90 per cent of security operations by 2010, driving the market for managed security services to $3.7 billion, according to a new study from the Yankee Group.
The increasing number of vulnerabilities and threats to communication systems is driving the rapid evolution of security technologies, says the Yankee analyst Matthew Kovar.
These developments are outpacing the enterprise's ability to keep up with the latest countermeasures and techniques to thwart attacks. Security is moving from the network perimeter further into the enterprise to critical network links, key hosts and servers, databases and end-user workstations.
The network once defined how information is accessed and secured. Now, the applications and end users dictate how communications will be initiated, which affects the accessibility and security of information.
Besides, new regulations, most notably the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Sarbanes-Oxley, have forced CEOs and CFOs to think of security from a business standpoint, instead of just an IT department concern.
"Organisations have used these legislated requirements to kick off security risk programmes known in the early generations as vulnerability-management initiatives," says Matthew Kovar.
"This directive has been a marketing coup for the companies that have taken vulnerability-scanning services and called them 'vulnerability-management services.'
"Managed security service providers are merely naming the services to align with what executives are trying to do. It was pure happenstance that the product name matched enterprise need, which will be profitable for those managed security service providers that offer these robust risk-management services."
