Small business content security market update
The worldwide content security market for the small business segment experienced strong growth of 23.3% in 2016. This represents significantly higher growth compared to previous years, mainly driven by greater compliance pressures as well as growing demand for more sophisticated endpoint security solutions in line with increasing levels of threat. Compliance has been a key theme across all regions, but strongly influenced investment in Europe as businesses begin to prepare for GDPR requirements. This made Europe, Middle East and Africa the fastest growing region, up 28.2%, also boosted by growing budgets in the Middle East and Africa. The Asia Pacific region and North America also experienced good growth of 21.8% and 21.3% respectively. While Latin America investment grew 16.2%, stronger growth is expected to follow in 2017 as IT budgets stabilize.
Other vendors in the market averaged a high growth rate of 23% during the year. Those vendors focusing on SaaS offerings gained market share by offering flexible solutions through more mature MSP programs. Many emerging vendors capitalized on aggressive marketing campaigns touting next-generation endpoint solutions. These vendors focused on signature-less threat prevention mechanisms and boasted high scores in competitive threat detection tests against established vendors. Channel partners suggest these solutions work in complement to traditional endpoint offerings and that any major vendor displacements have not taken place. Over the last year, many of the established vendors have been able to match these new capabilities through in-house product development. Canalys expects acquisitions to take place as well, which will help established vendors maintain their dominance. However, the market will become more competitive in 2017, as these new vendors gain more trust in the channel and end-customers.
Establishing an effective channel strategy will be imperative to growth for all vendors to succeed. As security becomes more complex and compliance requirements become stricter, small business customers who lack the expertise to keep up with the changes will heavily rely on partners. Vendors should combine effective endpoint security with compliance checklists, and through the channel deliver important advice on new employee training initiatives, which will help avoid the growing threat of ransomware and ensure business practices are compliant.