Future Market Insights released a report on the SD-WAN Security market forecasting a valuation of about $2.4 billion by the end of 2022, up from $2 billion in 2021.

SD-WAN security – comprising IP security (IPsec), next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), VPN tunnels, and the micro-segmentation of applications traffic – currently represents around 25% of the total network security market, according to the research firm.

Future Market Insights Research Manager Mohit Shrivastava told SDxCentral the network firewall segment of the SD-WAN security market accounts for the highest share (38.2%) and is anticipated to generate nearly $6.2 billion by 2032.

Shrivastava indicated IT and telecom are the sectors seeing the most growth, at “around 35 to 40% of the share of the total estimated security market.” He added that in terms of new adoption, the banking sector is one of the most promising to show increased market share "in the next few years."

Most surprisingly to him, Shrivastava noted, the report showed most market traction in the East Asia region. “We believe that this particular region could be growing at a much faster rate,” he said. “We also believe that there is also a lot of potential in the Southeast Asian countries because these other countries are within the developing phase.”

Shrivastava listed several factors behind the SD-WAN security market’s growth. Zero-touch provisioning, he said, is becoming more sought after because it minimizes the risk of human error in increasingly distributed networks. “[Enterprises] want the ability to remove unauthorized devices out of the network,” Shrivastava explained. “They need to create a chain of trust which can be enforced through a centralized network orchestrator.”

Another contributor to market growth is that many SD-WAN providers now offer access to threat intelligence services that can automatically identify and mitigate common security threats. 

“Large scale investments for network infrastructure modernization and increasing adoption of automation technologies like AI, cloud, and big data for network virtualization is also driving the market growth,” Shrivastava added. 

Shrivastava said enterprises in the current environment are faced with the challenge of securing enterprise workloads over a widely distributed network, leading to high chances of misconfiguration and too many users being granted levels of permissions.

A shortage of skilled security professionals to track network vulnerabilities makes that task all the more formidable. According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), there is a global shortage of 3 million cybersecurity professionals. 

That said, Shrivastava said enterprises are taking network security "more seriously than ever." While he expects market growth to slow by 2025, Shrivastava indicated it will never completely flatten. 

"It has now become a boardroom discussion, where enterprises are now specifically taking out budgets to improve their security posture or security infrastructure," he said. "They were not doing it before, but those attacks keep happening so now they are taking it more seriously and they want to invest earlier."