Antivirus sales to slow: Gartner

Growth in anti-virus products will slow in the next five years as enterprises broaden their use of security technologies.

Gartner’s latest security software market forecast has found that sales of antivirus technologies will slow in the next five years compared to products such as URL filtering, security information, event management, software and email security products.

Overall, revenue is projected to total $240 million in 2012, a compound annual growth rate of 9.1 percent from 2007 to 2012. Total revenue in 2008 is $219.4 million in 2008, a 13.5 percent increase from 2007.

Senior research analyst at Gartner Matthew Cheung said security spending is driven by a variety of pressing concerns. “The most immediate of which is the continuing need to ‘keep the bad guys out’ through defensive measures, such as next-generation firewalls.

"However, the ‘let the good guys in’ disciplines, such as identity and access management, are where business benefits and return on investment can be more clearly shown.”

According to Gartner, Australia has lower growth rates than other countries, but still represents the second largest market for security software in Asia Pacific after China.

According to Tom Scholz research VP at Gartner UK, in Australia information security architecture has been a hot topic recently. It is probably more hot in Australian than in Europe and certainly more than in the US.

“On the security organisational side, which includes security purchases, management and how to optimise security is very hot at the moment,” said Sholz. Scholz will be speaking at the Gartner’s IT Security Summit in Sydney next month.

Furthermore, the analyst firm predicts the growth is partly due to recently publicised data losses, mobile workforce and changes to the privacy guidelines.