After more than doubling in 2010, the global virtual
security appliance market is expected to hit about $670 million in 2011, up 57
percent year over year.

In the 5 years from 2010 to 2015, the virtual security
appliance market to more than quadruple, to $1.75 billion.

Since Juniper Networks’ acquisition of Altor Networks,
virtually all of Juniper’s major competitors have increased their product
development and marketing focus for virtual appliances, including Trend Micro,
Cisco, Check Point, F5, Blue Coat, Citrix, IBM, Symantec, HP, IBM, Enterasys,
Fortinet, and Watchguard.

Specialists like Vyatta and Catbird are still making
waves in the virtual security appliance market, and the virtualization platform
vendors themselves (VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft) are also in the mix for
security solutions.

The adoption of server virtualization
within wiring closets and data centers at organizations of all sizes and
the rollout of infrastructure to deliver IT services in the cloud is driving
significant change in the technical requirements for security solutions,
presenting unique challenges.

Some of the more vexing challenges include solving the
inter-virtual machine threat problem without falling into the expensive trap of
installing security software on every single virtual machine, deploying
security technology that protect the broad range of applications running in
virtualized environments, and navigating the complex web of vendors, standards,
APIs, and architectures in play for securing virtual environments.

These challenges represent key drivers for the virtual
security appliance market and reflect why the market is growing so fast,” said
Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.

By
Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]