Service providers see growth in VPN services

Providing VPN services is one of the hottest growth areas for service providers, says a new study by Infonetics Research.

According to a report called “Service Provider Plans for VPNs and Security,” VPN and security services are the two areas in which eight surveyed carriers expect the most revenue increase, with VPN services expected to grow 32% between 2005 and 2007.

While the bulk of remote access VPN services will continue to be based on IPSec, by year-end SSL VPNs will account for a fifth of total remote access VPN revenue for these carriers, the study says.

This goes along with other studies about the growing popularity of SSL VPN equipment that is bought by business in order to run their own VPNs rather than hire a service provider to do it for them.

Also paralleling what is happening in the equipment market, the study finds that customers are looking to roll other types of security in with their VPN service, particularly in North America. Virus and spam screening and content filtering are all expected to grow more rapidly here than in Europe, the study says.

Appliance vendors find that their firewall/VPN business is expanding as they introduce more and more security functions to their hardware platform. This indicates a mindset among customers that they want their security problems to be dealt with simply, either by having a single device handle it or a single service provider.

Bearing this out, the Infonetics reports also finds that the carriers surveyed listed keeping up with security threats as one of the most important technical challenges they face.