Security leaders get bigger

Consolidation in the security sector continued last week as three firms planned a merger to form a new security giant offering global services.

Risk management specialist TruSecure; Betrusted Holdings, a US developer of identity management solutions; and Ubizen, a subsidiary of Betrusted based in Belgium, that produces the OnlineGuardian software, last week moved to form a new company, Cybertrust.

The merger, which is subject to both shareholder and regulatory approval, would create a firm with wide expertise spanning various areas of security, including identity management, threat and vulnerability management and public-key encryption.

The announcement continues the trend towards consolidation in managed security services. Earlier this month Symantec agreed to buy security specialist @Stake on the back of its decision to take over email management specialist Brightmail; and late last year VeriSign acquired managed security specialist Guardent.

Andrew Braunberg, senior analyst for data security at Current Analysis, said the wave of consolidation in the security sector centred on identity management, content security and vulnerability management.

"ID management vendors have been moving toward complete suites for some time," Braunberg said. "This has lead most recently to a rash of acquisitions of provisioning vendors, starting with IBM's acquisition of Access360 several years ago but accelerating considerably over the last year."

Braunberg said growing demand for vulnerability control tools was also driving consolidation in patch management, vulnerability assessment, configuration management, security event management and desktop threat protection vendors. He cited McAfee's purchase of Foundstone and Patchlink's acquisition of Moonlight as examples.

"Expect this trend to accelerate," Braunberg said. "There is also the long-established move of traditional antivirus vendors extending their content and messaging protection to areas like anti-spam, anti-spyware, and content filtering."

Braunberg added, "These trends are positive for customers because solutions-based approaches make increasing sense. Base functionality will become increasingly commoditised and management, integration and compliance issues will become considerably more important."

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