06 March 2007

Increased collaboration between companies set to ignite new security market, says Gartner

Brian McKenna

An increasingly collaborative business community is opening organizations out to threats that will give rise to a new $10 billion market by 2012. Research house Gartner is predicting that the market that will promote and protect what it calls the ‘Communities of Trust’ could be worth at least $10 billion in five years time.

“Increasingly, we are seeing previously closed corporate networks being opened up to external parties such as suppliers, customers and even competitors,” said Jay Heiser, research vice president at Gartner. “Although such an open collaborative approach brings substantial business benefits, it does demand a radical rethink of existing trust mechanisms.

“Traditional security mechanisms provided by the operating system or network are just not suitable for meeting this kind of need,” said Heiser. “However, effective solutions can be found in security technology that overlays the existing infrastructure, instead of being dependent on it.”

Heiser said that the time had come for enterprises to adopt mandatory access control of the kind associated with the US military "about 15 years ago".

"Any two entities on the internet can communicate”, he said, “but collaboration requires trust."

Gartner estimates that the market represents more than $1 billion already. An early example of what the market will produce is ‘software as a service’ based trusted communities, such as Salesforce.com’s ‘Partner Relationship Management’ offering.

Virtualization technologies, such as those from VMware and Citrix are included in Gartner’s reading of this nascent market, Heiser confirmed. But he stressed that many companies will have much of what they need already to secure inter-company collaboration. “Some organisations may well find that they have the makings of a perfectly suitable Community of Trust infrastructure, without being aware of how easy it would be to improve external collaboration,” he said.

"In part, it’s about being able to put a technical footprint on someone else’s system”, said Heiser.

He added that the development will offer IT professionals an opportunity to turn themselves into “heroes because of the usefulness of their expertise. It’s certainly a lot more interesting than a lot of the things that we have had to spend our time on”.

Back to news index