As we discussed in our post on network security, one of the things our recent ‘Who Secures The UAE’ report looked into was which vendors CISOs in the region considered most effective when it came to a range of security areas.
‘Network security’ and ‘endpoint security’ were perhaps the two broadest categories we asked about; accordingly, it should come as little surprise that these were the categories in which most votes were cast.
In corporate IT environments, one of the major risks is the number of devices which form the network, each of them a possible attack vector. This becomes particularly complicated when dealing with the widening of the network security perimeter caused by the advent of BYOD and the use of personal devices (such as smartphones or tablets) for work – and use of work devices for non-work purposes.
Mobile device and IoT security present specific challenges and are included as separate categories in our research as a result, but they too fall under the ‘endpoint security’ heading.
In the network security category, participants clearly had strong feelings – not only did this question receive the highest number of responses, it was one where we saw a very clear winner emerge, with Cisco claiming almost a third of all votes cast.
We see something very similar in the endpoint security category. Thirteen vendors were nominated, but Symantec stood out as the champion here with 29% of the vote.
Runners up McAfee and Kaspersky Lab received, respectively, 18% and 16% each. Other nominees included Trend Micro, Malwarebytes, Carbon Black, Cisco and Crowdstrike.
Symantec’s success in this category is no surprise – it’s had a solid reputation in the endpoint security space for years, and according to IDC, just a few years ago it held 18.2% share of the corporate endpoint security market, and 27.6% of the combined corporate and consumer market.
Investment in the endpoint security market has been increasing, with ‘next gen’ endpoint security in particular attracting significant funding – recent examples including Series E rounds in the hundreds of millions for Crowdstrike and Cylance. The responses we received indicate that at least for UAE-based CISOs, ‘traditional’ providers are still holding down the top spots – but the popularity of challengers, such as Carbon Black and Crowdstrike, is growing.
