Sales of enterprise security products in Europe continue to be impacted by the Covid crisis, with businesses updating endpoints and networks to make sure employees can work securely from home, according to the latest data published by Context.
After remarkable growth in March, April and May, European sales of enterprise security products seemed to have slowed in June.
However, there has been significant growth since the start of July, when it became obvious to businesses that the workforce would stay at home for a longer period of time, and 4-week-rolling revenues for week 30 showed particularly strong growth.
France and the UK are the main drivers of the European enterprise security market, and there was significant growth in both countries during July and at the beginning of August. (Although year-on-year revenue increases in France were already high in June, this was partly due to a rather weak performance in June 2019.)
Endpoint security revenues grew more than those from network security products and saw a peak in week 30. While trends in both main segments of the enterprise security are similar, the protection of endpoints is a priority for businesses while so many people are working from home.
While sales of traditional endpoint protection platforms (e.g. Internet security suites that include antivirus, anti-malware and other features) continue to grow significantly, those of endpoint detection and response solutions – which have more advanced capabilities and are able to detect and respond to less traditional cybersecurity threats – are also increasing.
“With employees working away from the office during the Covid-19 crisis, security challenges have increased massively,” says Gurvan Meyer, business enterprise analyst at Context. “Companies can act by protecting endpoints, and increasing sales of security products show they are doing just that.
“However, new challenges arise from the behaviour of a home-based workforce: for example, mixing personal and professional tasks on a corporate computer increases risks from scam emails.
“Ownership and responsibility for security has begun to move from the usual corporate bubble to the individual.
“With companies talking about permanently increasing the number of employees working from home, the associated challenges will create new opportunities for security vendors.”