IDC Anticipates Strong Security Appliance Growth for MEA Region

As threats continue to emerge across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, we can expect to see healthy growth in the region's security appliance market over the coming years, according to the newly launched Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Quarterly Security Appliance Forecast Tracker from International Data Corporation (IDC), the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets.

IDC expects that the MEA security appliances market will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 per cent over the next four years to total approximately $350 million in customer revenues.

Faysal Ayoubi, a systems and infrastructure solutions research analyst at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, said “companies throughout the region will continue to invest in IT security over the coming years. This will be driven by the growing complexity and frequency of cyber threats in the region and the requirement to install security systems for regulatory compliance reasons.”

Unified threat management (UTM) and firewalls/VPN will lead the demand curve, accounting for a combined share of about 80% of the total security appliance market by 2016.

“CIOs seek a complete security solution to handle the threats they are exposed to, and this solution may be a combination of hardware, software, and cloud services," said Ayoubi.

He noted that “today, multifunction security hardware solutions are preferred to single-function solutions in the MEA region, so we expect to see continuous growth for these combination technologies."

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are the leading markets for security appliances in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), while finance, telecommunications, and government are the region's biggest-spending verticals on IT.

Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya are increasingly becoming strong markets in sub-Saharan Africa. “The MEA region is poised to see an enormous level of investment pumped into the expansion of security infrastructure after numerous high-profile cyber breaches made the news headlines in recent months," says Ayoubi.

"Further growth in subsequent years will be primarily driven by the fast-growing Internet adoption rate and increasing demand for IT-enabled business solutions in emerging markets. Moreover, initiatives undertaken by governments at the country level will be a vital driver of the region’s IT spending growth."

IDC's EMEA Quarterly Security Appliance Forecast Tracker provides market size data for security appliance technologies in an easy-to-use Excel Pivot Table format. The geographic coverage of the Tracker includes three major regions (Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa) and 42 countries. The security appliance market is further segmented by function, sub-function, price band, family, model, server class, and operating system.