Cloud security is a growing opportunity for partners.

That can be deduced from the findings in a new report from Infonetics Research, which says the cloud-security services market grew more than 13 percent last year, to $7.2 billion worldwide. That’s up from $6.3 billion the year prior.

The arrival of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) is likely to push that number quite a bit higher in the years to come, the report’s author says.

"Our long-term outlook for the already very large cloud and CPE managed security services market, especially for cloud services, is quite strong as providers begin to leverage their SDN and NFV rollouts to really scale the delivery of managed security services," said Jeff Wilson, research director for cybersecurity technology at Infonetics Research, now part of IHS. "Providers are leaning heavily on SDN and the promise of NFV, and this will help them deliver a wide range of new security services that leverage virtual appliances for protecting applications, data and infrastructure in their own clouds, and delivering new services to customers.”

Just this week, Verizon laid out its road map for software-defined networking and Level 3 Communications talked about software’s growing importance in networking during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

The Infonetics report says that managed-security service revenue totaled nearly $16 billion in 2014; that was up 10 percent from the year before. Cloud-based offerings made up nearly half (46 percent) of security-service revenue last year, with CPE-based services contributing the rest.

2018 will be the year that cloud-security services surpass those that are CPE-based, Infonetics predicts. Content security is the largest contributor to cloud-based security service revenue, followed by managed firewalls; other security services; distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation; and intrusion detection and prevention systems.

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