The secure content management (SCM) market in the Asia-Pacific region is set to grow 15.4 per cent in 2010 compared to just 6.3 per cent in 2009, according to analysts Frost & Sullivan.

The firm expects the sales of email filtering services, which had accounted for US$265.1 million or 59 per cent of the total content security market in 2009, to grow by 15.8 per cent from the present until 2016, and sales of web security services to enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 21.5 per cent until 2016.

The company also forecasts that the regional market, which covers 14 countries including Japan, will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18.4 per cent and will enjoy slightly less than US$1.5 billion in revenues from 2009-2016.

Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager Edison Yu said that the company expects service platform migration for cost control to be a major driving factor behind the SCM industry’s growth.

Companies are quickly realising the benefits of selecting a services approach, according to Yu. Content security services such as email filtering have proven to be beneficial in more ways than one, thanks to their cost and productivity advantages. In addition, these services are excellent “poster technologies” for security services as a whole, given that security scans do not tangibly impact end-user experience.

Yu said the spread of Web technologies over the last two years, such as the use of the Web sphere for business processes and Web 2.0 technologies, has spurred firms to undertake measures to secure their Web gateways beyond simply conducting URL filtering measures.

Yu said that Frost & Sullivan expects converged Web security services, such as application control and anti-malware, to become more popular in the future and to become part of standard security options offered by providers.