BalaBit IT Security, an innovative information security company, one of the global leaders in developing privileged activity monitoring, trusted logging and proxy-based gateway technologies announced an increase of 59 percent on a year-on-year basis in 2010. According to industry and analyst predictions last year there was a slight increase on the IT security market, where the drivers were the compliance related investments. BalaBit’s performance – as a niche market player, due to its comprehensive global partner and customer base – highly exceeded the global market expectations. For 2011 BalaBit expects to report a 40 percent growth of revenue and the number of employees by extending its global partner network and further increasing the revenue share from global sales.
The company has been developing IT security software technologies since 2000, aiming to satisfy even the highest security needs. BalaBit offers solutions for companies handling sensitive data and processes, such as the financial and telecommunication sector, manufacturing, and multinational enterprises. The company's revenue from its most popular product, Shell Control Box, an activity monitoring tool for privileged access (system administrators, executives, outsourcing service providers), increased by 187 percent from 2009 to 2010. BalaBit’s open source log server application, syslog-ng, helping customers to meet compliance regulations, also contributed to the successful results with 28 percent revenue growth, and Zorp Gateway contributed 19 percent.
”Our financial results underline the success of our long term global strategy. Last year we not only strengthened but further increased our market positions. As a technology company, we focus on creating an innovative atmosphere, which results that our products are acknowledged among the best of breed solutions worldwide, tested and awarded by for instance ICSA labs and West Coast Labs” said Zoltán Györkő, Business Development Director at BalaBit IT Security. ”In the next few years we expect the consolidation of compliance related tools to be one of the most important market trends. This means that all solutions, which were enforced to be implemented by regulations, and now operate as isolated tools, organizations will now gradually involve them to create added values. This process helps vendors who are able to satisfy both IT security and system management needs at the same time.”
Market trends and expectations for 2011
Compliance drives investment priorities: IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice firm, predicts in its recent White Paper titled “Compliance is More Than Just Cost: Creating Value Beyond Compliance” a return to growth for IT investment strategies in EMEA banking after two years of regressive or flat spend in 2011. This market has multiple growth drivers, but the key component is the sheer volume of new regulations that are being added by local and regional oversight organizations that compound an already highly regulated industry. On average, European banks spend around 10% of their IT budget on compliance. In 2011, IDC expects this to increase to 15% to 20%, depending on the size of the organization.
IT Security budgets are still spent on solutions to strengthen the first line defense: although most companies already have implemented their basic IT Security infrastructure, IT security vendors see that most part of the IT Security budgets are still spent on secure content and threat management solutions.
