Unified threat management spend grows says Juniper

A new study from Juniper Research has found that enterprises’ spending on unified threat management will increase by 98 per cent between 2023 and 2028 globally, from $7.5 billion in 2023.

The report said that growing enterprise cloud adoption, IoT devices and AI were making life more complex making threat management necessary for enterprises to stay secure.

The report said that means that there will be increasing levels of investment by enterprises as they acknowledge the expanding threat landscape.

Unified threat management is an approach to information security where a single hardware or software installation provides multiple security functions. This contrasts with the traditional method of having point solutions for each security function and simplifies protection.

As part of the study, Juniper Research released its latest Competitor Leaderboard for 2023. Underpinned by a robust scoring methodology, the new Competitor Leaderboard ranked the top 17 unified threat management platforms, using criteria such as completeness of their solutions and future business prospects.

The top 5 vendors for 2023:
1. IBM
2. Cisco Umbrella
3. Juniper Networks
4. Fortinet
5. Palo Alto Networks

The research found the leading players scored well based on their breadth of protection capabilities, as well as their use of AI for managing evolving threats and coordinating responses. In order to stay ahead of the competition, vendors must develop advanced SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) solutions, which enable local and remote services to be protected with the same security and networking policies, to further advance security.

Report co-author Nick Maynard said: “Enterprises want to minimise risk, whilst increasing value from IT spend. Unified threat management enables enterprises to collate and act on information in a single location, reducing complexity and cost. The best vendors will leverage AI to reduce manual requirements and increase the return on investment for businesses.”