Study: UTM Market To Grow To Nearly $4B In Next Three Years

A rising tide of sophisticated, blended threats that employ multiple attack vectors will help drive the unified threat management technology market to double in a five-year span, according to a report released this week.

According to new projections from market research firm Frost & Sullivan, the demand for UTM -- a technology that combines multiple security functions into a single firewall-based appliance -- will grow from about $1.8 billion in 2010 to more than $3.7 billion in 2015.

"The value of integrated solutions becomes all the more apparent in an environment of advanced attacks, wherein cyber criminals favor blended attacks that use multiple vectors and require more than one security function," Frost & Sullivan says.

The compound annual growth rate for UTM technology is more than 15 percent, according to the report. There are some 43 vendors that offer UTM tools.

In recent years, UTM has become identified with small businesses and branch offices that purchased consolidated security appliances because they had neither the budget nor the skills to maintain multiple fixed-function devices. But larger enterprises are now moving UTM closer to the core, says Rob Ayoub, former global program director for network security at Frost & Sullivan and current CTO for Fortinet, a leading seller of UTM technology.

"When a blended attack occurs, some or all of it may get through a single-function device or application," Ayoub says. "UTM gives you that layered defense, in which one tool may stop an attack that another tool doesn't."

"UTM provides fundamental security technologies that organizations, regardless of industry or size, require," the Frost & Sullivan report states.

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