This report addresses the following key questions:

• How will the computer security market develop over the next five years?

• How are our changing communication habits affecting the industry?

• Which technologies and approaches to computer security will gain in importance?

• Will growth in the market be driven by the government and public sector, large enterprises, or SMEs and consumers?

• How is the cloud and growth in e-commerce affecting the market?

Computer security, often also referred to as cyber security, is the set of processes and technologies that facilitate business, commerce, and consumer digital activity in a safe environment. Cyber security, however, is far from simple. Threats to computerised environments are many and various, and are changing on a neardaily basis.

Threats to individual, corporate, and government activities online come from three primary sources:

• Criminal behaviour: attempts at committing fraud for (usually) financial gain

• Hacking: Disrupting corporate or government activities by denial of service, defacing online content, and generally damaging online reputation;

• Espionage: gathering corporate or government information illegally to subvert competitive advantage or national security.

The number and sophistication of threats to the cyber infrastructure are increasing daily. Numerous reports cite the increasing number of security breaches and newspapers regularly run stories of lost data files, hacked bank accounts, and stolen identities.

All values quoted in this report are at current prices unless otherwise specified.

The term billion refers to one thousand million.

Some numbers in tables do not add exactly due to rounding.

Reports are researched and written by MBD’s in-house, specialist business-to-business consultants. Research is based on both an analysis of official information and on original, trade research, providing both a quantitative and qualitative view of the market. MBD’s unique range of frequently updated reports provide an integrated body of ongoing research, enabling deep understanding of the prevailing trends and the drivers of these trends based on trade opinion.

The following abbreviations appear in this report:

There are four major key trends, which are independent and driving the growth of the entire IT sector:

• cloud computing

• mobility

• social computing

• big data and analytics

All four of these fundamental trends have a major impact on cyber security, which is tied intrinsically into the overall dynamics of the IT market. While the total IT market has reached a level of market penetration that limits growth to overall economic activity, the dynamism of these four driving forces is such that the growth of the computer security market is stronger, and one of the most buoyant sectors of the entire IT industry.