Breach detection market expected to exceed $1.3 billion by 2018

Security breaches have become a major worry for businesses in the last two years and that's reflected in strong growth of the market for breach detection products.

A new market intelligence brief by NSS Labs looks at the rapid rise of breach detection systems (BDS). In 2013 the BDS market was worth over $289 million dollars, up 99 percent over the previous year.

The market is expected to continue growing at an annual rate of 36.9 percent to reach $1.39 billion by 2018. Given that BDS is an emerging market with few products that have been around for more than three years this is an impressive jump.

The study finds that lack of mature solutions along with inconsistent marketing is, however, causing considerable confusion around the necessity, effectiveness and best practices for deployment of these products. The high price of many on-premises solutions is also inhibiting adoption.

Another barrier is that BDS solutions are complex in their own right and require a level of security expertise that is currently hard to find. As a result many vendors are deploying cloud-based or managed offerings to offset the high costs and complexities of BDS. NSS Labs predicts that hybrid solutions could become the primary vehicle for BDS deployments in the future.

Current BDS offerings are deployed primarily as hardware appliances, but many vendors are also introducing virtual appliances, software as a service and the endpoint as part of the product suite.

The report notes that, "The immediate challenges for the BDS market are twofold: Vendors must demonstrate that these expensive solutions do in fact provide increased security (i.e, they will discover threats that all other devices in the security stack have missed), and end users must be trained in how to deploy these devices and manage their output".

To address the training issue some vendors are offering services built around these solutions or are integrating breach detection into their existing security products.

NSS Labs concludes that there's no best approach to BDS, it's more important to determine what works best for a particular business. More details on the report are available on the NSS labs site.

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