The Asia-Pacific security software market will reach revenues of $4 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent from the $2.49 billion it hit in 2010, predicts Ovum.

Strong growth will be driven by the increasing threat to enterprises from organised gangs and the changing business technology landscape.

Ovum principal analyst Graham Titterington notes that the global security software market will see strong growth during the next few years, with revenues increasing from $16.76 billion at the end of 2010 to $23.3 billion at the end of 2015.

"Asia-Pacific will experience stronger growth because of the pace of technological advance in the region and the growing level of security awareness," says Titterington.

“One of the key drivers for this is the increasing threat to enterprises from well-organised gangs from rival organisations, which want to steal valuable data for their own gains. These organisations, which include governments, have the resources to ramp up the threat level and launch advanced and persistent attacks, which are difficult to defeat."

The competitive market in the region makes this threat a particular concern, stresses Titterington.

Changes in business technology and operations are also creating new security demands.

According to Titterington, the major changes that will drive the growth of the market during the next few years are cloud computing, increased mobility and business use of social networking. The security issues these phenomena raise can be significant, and they need to be tackled accordingly.

Titterington adds that emerging trends such as greater interoperability of systems between organisations, the use of shared user authentication systems (particularly for enterprise customers and employees of partner organisations) and increasing use of virtualisation technology will also have an impact on take-up of security software.