Security is always in the news so it hardly comes as a surprise that the market for security products is growing. According to research specialist Gartner the worldwide security software market was up 5.3 percent in 2014.

In terms of value the market is worth $21.4 billion, however, the make up of that market is shifting. Low growth in endpoint protection platforms and a decline in consumer security software -- possibly because of improved built-in security in the latest versions of Windows -- are balanced by high-growth areas, such as security information and event management (SIEM), secure Web gateway (SWG), identity governance and administration (IGA) and enterprise content-aware data loss prevention (DLP).

"Overall market growth was up slightly in 2014 to 5.3 percent from 4.9 percent in 2013," says Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner. "Even though the SWG segment experienced single-digit growth in 2014, cloud-based and hybrid SWG deployments are becoming increasingly popular. As organizations' corporate data traffic becomes more exposed to the Internet and moves out of the control of traditional network security boundaries, SWG technologies continue to be an important piece of the overall security technology strategy of most enterprises".

Symantec remains the biggest player in the security market with $3.69 billion of revenue, but it suffered its second consecutive year of revenue decline in 2014. This is in part due to its heavy reliance on consumer security software which accounts for 53 percent of its business.

Intel -- which owns McAfee -- is in second place with $1.8 billion, up 4.6 percent, followed by IBM which saw its security software revenue up 17 percent in 2014 to reach $1.48 billion.

The DLP market grew 15.8 percent year on year to reach $643 million in revenue in 2014. This was mainly due to a strong showing from Symantec in this sector, accounting for nearly half of the total market. SIEM was up 11 percent to $1.6 billion thanks to a strong focus on threat detection and response from security buyers.

The full report is available to Gartner subscribers via the Gartner - security software report.

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