Richard Turner, Clearswift's CEO, told Infosecurity that since his appointment with the company last year, despite the fact that Clearswift has been around in the marketplace since 1982 and security appliances are becoming more commonplace, there is still a need to educate businesses about the benefits of IT security appliances.

"There are a lot of companies out there who only have very basic IT security installed on their systems, typically an anti-virus application, so there is still a considerable need in the industry for education amongst business users of the threats that the internet poses them today", he said.

"The problem for us is that some communications channels can be black holes as far as information is concerned. Having said that, a growing number of customers are starting to understand the scale of the security problem and are taking steps to protect themselves", he added.

Turner told Infosecurity that Web 2.0 services pose a particular threat to businesses, not least because of the attraction they hold for most organisations in terms of helping with new business and communication channels.

Most organisations, he explained, tend to be less secure on the web side of things, or are not tapping the potential of Web 2.0 services because they are worried about the security issues.

"Security has, in many ways, become convergent in terms of the threats that are out there. Viruses are mingling with malware and phishing attacks, which all helps to make the potential threat much worse than it was just a few years ago", he said.

"And when we engage with customers, [we] were finding that they talk about these convergent threats and ask what we, as security vendors, can do to better protect against them", he added.

Turner went on to say that he and his team are increasingly seeing organisations deploying their security appliances into the world of virtualised servers, owing to the cost savings that virtualised systems now offer.