The virtual security market is set to see a boom in the next five years after it experienced 64 per cent growth in 2009 over 2008, a report from Infonetics Research has shown.
The industry reached a value of $203.8 million (136.7 million) last year and now the analyst firm has predicted that the market will grow almost eight-fold from 2009 to 2014, to reach almost $1.6 billion (1.08 billion).
Comparing the first quarter of 2009 to the same period in the previous year, the sector grew by 119 per cent. Currently, North America is home to the biggest regional market for virtual security products.
"The nascent virtual security appliance market is primed for tremendous growth over the next five years," said Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.
He added: "The drivers for this market are strong, and include the increasing volume and variety of security threats, the rapid adoption of server virtualisation, new security challenges presented by virtualisation, such as inter-virtual machine threats, and the availability of purpose-built solutions for securing virtualised server environments."
Security firms have been busy creating products to protect virtual systems, with Trend Micro working on technology using the VMsafe API, which provides software developers with more control and monitoring capability than was previously possible.
