Security on the Rise in Indian Enterprises
By Anuradha Ramamirtham
Mumbai, May 15, 2007

IDC's latest survey report, 'Investment and Adoption Plans for Security Software 2007' has reported that along with countries like Australia, China and Korea, the Indian IT enterprises and SMBs are increasing their focus on investments in security applications.

The survey states that 84% of Indian companies have deployed secure content management systems, 71% have deployed identity and access management software, and 64% have deployed other types of security software.

"According to IDC, in 2006 the overall security solutions market in India stood at US$ 142 million, and was expected to grow at a CAGR of 29.8 % over the period 2005-2010, with leading players in the security software market being Cisco, Trend Micro, Symantec, Check Point, McAfee, RSA, CA, IBM, Fortinet and Juniper. Security solution implementation has emerged as a key focus area for organizations across India, be it large enterprises or small and medium businesses," said Praveen Sengar, manager (Software & Services Research) of IDC India.

The increase in deployment was credited to the increasing importance given to IT security in organizations, and the uplifting of installed security software by growing enterprises.

Speaking to CXOtoday.com, Raghu Raman, head (global practice) of Mahindra Special Services Group (MSSG) said, "Growth in IT spending is not limited to IT industries. It is increasing dramatically in all segments, and the IT segment is one of them. The general focus is to achieve 100% security."

"There are three main reasons for such high deployments of security software in the Indian region. Because the world data is coming to India, security has to increase. Also, Indian IT enterprises believe in 'prevention being better than cure' as the judiciary resources in India are not optimum and cannot match global standards," said Raman.

Even in the approach to adoption of security solutions, enterprises encounter dilemma between a technology centric solution and a flexible suite of solutions. The users must differentiate between human centric and technology centric solutions. A human centric solution is always better because of its user friendliness and easy implementation," clarified Raman.

Although the survey revealed that many respondents prefer to purchase their software as part of an integrated solution package that includes hardware, software and services;
Kartik Sahani, director (Sales) of McAfee said, "There is no such trend of people preferring an integrated solution package. People, mostly buy the infrastructure and then separately buy the solutions as per their application needs."

Pritesh Thaker, assistant vice president (IT) of UTI Bank said, "Whenever we go for a new security application, it always depends on the existing hardware. We prefer bundled software solutions, and are in an association with Norton presently."

IDC defines the Security Content Management software as solutions designed to protect against inbound and outbound threats. Inbound threats include spam, fraudulent emails, viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, and offensive materials, while outbound ones include confidential data, customer records, intellectual property, and offensive content leaving an organization.