"Businesses are struggling to protect themselves as these outside threats become more resistant to signature-based security tools," said Christine Liebert, senior analyst, Security Services. "It's becoming clear that many of these emerging threats cannot be defended against in-house, creating a shift in security posture toward being more proactive."

The security services threat intelligence market is made up of advanced security event monitoring and management technologies that incorporate a variety of threat-related information sources to develop predictive security. However, emerging Web applications and other difficult-to-detect attacks are changing the security protection landscape and, subsequently, enterprise security posture.

Signature-based tools including antivirus products, firewalls, and intrusion prevention software are only effective against 30 to 50 percent of current security threats, IDC says. Attacks are becoming shorter, lasting less than a couple of hours or only a few minutes, and can be highly targeted to a specific URL, person, company, or IT asset. This trend further complicates detection, mitigation, and remediation. Over the past five years, attackers have enlarged their scope to include commercial small and medium businesses (SMBs) offering high-value targets such as financial information, intellectual property, and other proprietary data.

Many organizations, despite having implemented some of the more standard countermeasures such as firewalls, antivirus, IDs, still do not have visibility across their environment to understand what is happening at any given time, IDC says. To ensure that enterprise network, application, data, and endpoints can remain secure, anti-malware products and services are evolving to deal with these threats and reducing reliance on general signatures by instead adopting other forms of detection. From 2010 to 2011, security services threat intelligence products and services grew 65 percent in North America as enterprises looked to proactively monitor and mitigate malicious network traffic.

Security threats are evolving and organizations struggle to keep pace. Advanced security event monitoring and management technologies grew 65 percent in North America on a year by year base from 2010 to 2011. Common signature based security tools are only effective against 30 to 50 percent of current threats. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“This is the biggest annual growth we’ve seen for this market since 2008,” said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner. “Pressures to optimize costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organizations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organizations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives.”

From a regional perspective, North America and Europe will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in Asia/Pacific, where revenue will increase by 30 percent from 2012 to reach $209 million. “MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, ‘big data’ and data in the cloud,” Graham said.

Within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favor specialized solutions over "generic" offerings. However, the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players - IBM, Oracle and SAP.  “In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialization while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios,” said Chad Eschinger, research director at Gartner.

However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for the entrance of data integration and data quality providers, in particular. As more midsize organizations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing/software as a service.

The largest domains are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organization cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach $644 million in 2012 and to exceed $1 billion in 2015. The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organization store product-related master data, metadata, or both, is projected to reach $688 million in 2012 and to surpass $1.1 billion in 2015.

“The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organizations,” said Graham. “MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence.”

"Uniquely positioned within their enterprises, CIOs are at the fulcrum of business and technology, and they are the only executives with sufficient visibility and potential capability to address the challenges posed by today's euro zone crisis," said David Furlonger, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Business leaders are crying out for CIOs to demonstrate more effectively the capability of IT and, specifically, to add value to the business. Therefore, this crisis also presents CIOs with an opportunity to make substantial and bold steps to meet CEO demands, and demonstrate the importance and true value of IT."

Most enterprises and their IT departments are burdened with significant numbers of bureaucratic processes, and today's market conditions require business and government executives to radically restructure their business practices. "Market conditions require CIOs to help develop a working environment that promotes speed, agility and adaptability - without sacrificing accountability," Gartner vice president and analyst Andrea Di Maio said. "Change management capabilities will be critical. The foundation to achieve effective change management will demand information, analytics, HR flexibility and a more decentralized command-and-control management structure."

The costs of and access to capital across Europe will likely continue to worsen until there is a significant redress in structural imbalances between countries and organizations. Unwillingness or inability to write off debt and restructure public- and private-sector balance sheets is a substantial barrier to market efficiency. Lines of credit will likely become uncertain or removed, forcing corporations to reduce inventory. "In this situation, CIOs will face zero-growth budgeting at best, and substantial reductions in both the investment capital and the operational budget made available to run the business at worst," Furlonger said. "If a market meltdown occurs, then critical resources and supplies may be at risk. CIOs and other executives must develop contingency plans to ensure multiple backups."

Millions of people are out of work in Europe. Formal government austerity packages and informal corporate restrictions on salaries, benefits and working conditions, combined with high costs of living, are stressing workforces. This situation is compounded by retirement funding shortfalls, extensions in the working age and loss of benefits. "CIOs and business executives face significant HR issues in terms of rewarding and motivating staff, securing funds to hire appropriate new talent, and dealing with the personnel hardships of individuals entering the work environment, which impair productivity," Di Maio said. "They must also plan for retention issues of foreign workers moving to better opportunities or the removal of non-EU work permits and visas in response to political backlash from rapidly rising unemployment, resulting in a 'brain drain'."

The capital markets (and many corporations) believe that the risk of government and counterparty default is substantial. Receivables management is being stressed, and the likelihood of internal and external fraud rises, Gartner says. "Prior to the crisis, enterprises were already challenged to identify enterprise wide risks in a holistic fashion to link those risks to the performance of the business and to manage risk in a time-effective manner," Furlonger said. "Now, the CIO - and corporate treasurer, head trader, CFO and others - need to ask questions such as, 'Can existing risk models accommodate alternatives to the lack of historical data (in many cases, as much as three years of back data is required) necessary for regression testing/yield curve analysis of hedges, and for stressing asset and liability portfolios in the event of a redenomination in all or part of their asset and liability portfolio?"

"Unlike recent economic difficulties, today's crisis has the potential to totally undermine the euro zone, the whole EU and beyond," said Di Maio. "Spurred on by the pervasiveness of the Internet, the crisis negatively affects every enterprise or individual doing business in or with the region. The CIO's top responsibility is to guarantee business continuity."

If a provider is competing as a specialist, it specializes in one technology area, and it doesn't try to be all things to all people. It doesn't go to market with converged systems or as a one-stop shot. Specialists want to be perceived as best-in-class in their technology area and covet a reputation as the provider with the most innovative or advanced technology. True specialists may well be better off trying to lead within their technology area than expanding into adjacent markets.

On the other hand, portfolio providers are large suppliers that sell all or some of the various components that make up the data center infrastructure. In the traditional portfolio provider model, these technologies are developed in-house.

Partnering is an alternative way to get all the necessary infrastructure components into the provider's portfolio if it doesn't have offerings in every category in-house. This approach also enables providers to focus their resources on the things they do best and rely on partners for the rest. However, partnerships can be fickle, and sometimes they falter. Those taking the portfolio-by-partnership route should not underestimate the resources required to effectively manage and nurture these partnership relationships.

Some portfolio providers have taken a step beyond certification, integration and test, and developed converged systems or integrated offerings for the data center. If the trend of approaching change in the data center with a definitive strategic plan that includes an integrated project road map continues into 2012, then going to market in this way could position providers as market leaders rather than market followers. Undertaking this strategy is a bold move. This approach represents a commitment to a new kind of data center and a new relationship between providers and customers. It requires significant investment and has the potential to take a long time to achieve a good return on investment (ROI).

Portfolio providers with a data center transformation (DCT) offering have the opportunity to sell both in the traditional, silo-based way and as a converged system or integrated stack. This strategy has all the benefits of both strategies and, with the exception of not being part of the holistic data center conversation, all of the disadvantages as well. Going to market both ways allows providers to cover all the bases no matter what buyers opt to do, both individually in the short term and collectively for the longer range.

The final go-to-market strategy alternative for the data center is to deliver the technology as a service via cloud computing or otherwise. Advantages to pursuing this go-to-market option, at least for technology (as opposed to service) providers, include the fact that there are several ways to go about it, some requiring less infrastructure investment than others. This alternative also allows providers to stick to their area of expertise while still tapping into the key wants and needs of data center customers. One critical decision faced by those who select this option is whether to transition existing customers to these models (and if so, how) or to pursue a dual strategy in which they sell both in the traditional way and as a service simultaneously.

The picture shows an operation engineer overseeing a Network Operations Control Room of a data center. Photo: Public Domain

Datacenter connectivity, disaster recovery/business continuity, and data storage replication are the three primary applications driving adoption of Ethernet. "Enterprises are increasingly utilizing Ethernet services for domestic and international WAN networking," said Nav Chander, research manager, Enterprise Telecom. "The ability to efficiently transport multiple types of traffic - including voice and video, as well as non-IP-based traffic and storage traffic - is a key differentiator for Ethernet services within the enterprise."

Growth of Ethernet access as an alternative to leased lines for access to other services, such as to the Internet or IP VPNs, is also contributing to demand. Additionally, Ethernet services are often significantly less expensive than private line or packet services, and lower equipment costs also contribute to overall cost effectiveness.

Other key findings include the following:

• E-Line services make up slightly more than half of the Ethernet services revenue at present;
• Ethernet access market will maintain growth rates above 20 percent during the forecast period;
• More medium-sized enterprises are also adopting Ethernet as they migrate to VoIP, employ storage networking, and access cloud-based services;
• Implementation of hybrid Ethernet and IP VPN networks are a growing trend among enterprises.

Ethernet seems to be wired for success: Adaption rates are soaring, and revenue in the U.S. is expected to increase from $3.4 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2015. Photo: Public Domain