Blog

“Assume you have been breached” has become standard advice from information security professionals today. As organizations continue to be breached, the conventional approach to information security – in which layers of best-of-breed security technologies are used to protect an organization – is being challenged. Many organizations are beginning to acknowledge that in fact it is not possible to guarantee protection. Consequently, a new technology has emerged in the market: breach detection systems (BDS) provide on-premises analysis of suspicious files and traffic beyond the execution of files in a sandbox and examine diverse indicators to determine whether traffic is malicious.

The newest NSS Labs competitive intelligence tools examine this emerging market, providing separate reports on the vendors and products, as well as a Market Intelligence Brief that provides a comprehensive analysis of the BDS market. Through interviews with vendors and enterprises, NSS has assessed the maturity of the BDS market and has concluded that this nascent market may well become the cornerstone of information security.

As is often the case with a new technology, enterprises are struggling with deployments of BDS products. Current solutions are expensive and complex, and the alert data received from BDS require advanced forensics skills. Even more concerning is the fact that, currently, most products perform detection only and thus organizations will require another device to perform blocking or remediation. While some vendors have the advantage of being first to market, slow adoption by customers and innovative technical approaches have leveled the playing field and opened up the market to a host of vendors that include both established security vendors and emerging pure-plays.

NSS predicts that the BDS market will have a compound annual growth rate of 36.9 percent through 2018, reaching a total market size of US$1.39 billion. This remarkably high growth illustrates how critical a component of the security stack the BDS is expected to become and how great are the concerns regarding the challenge of detecting contemporary attacks. Detailed analysis of the vendors in the BDS market, their products, and the market itself is available in this latest set of reports from NSS.

As is the case with NSS’ other competitive intelligence research, these reports will be refreshed periodically. Up-to-date data is particularly crucial in dynamic markets such as BDS.