Security service market still has much space for investors

VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam is really a market with great potentials for security service providers. Though the market took shape many years ago, there’s still much space for new comers.

Eric Hoh, Vice President of Symantec South East Asia, said on Dau tu that Symantec still can see a lot of opportunities to push up its business activities in the Vietnamese market.

“In recent years, in South East Asia, Vietnam and Indonesia have emerged as the potential markets with the high and stable GDP growth rates,” he said.

Besides, Vietnam also has a large community of small and medium enterprises which Symantec considers the targeted clients for developing the services relating to business security.

Another senior executive of Symantec – Raymond Goh – declined to reveal the figures about the revenue and market share of the company, but has affirmed that Symantec is the sixth biggest security service provider to businesses in Vietnam, affirming that Symantec would make further investment in stepping up the business activities in the potential market.

Preliminary statistics show that there are some 10 security service providers in Vietnam, including well known foreign names such as Symantec, Kaspersky and Watchguard.

Also according to Raymond Goh, Symantec has reaped fruits in Vietnam thanks to its reasonable investment structure, from the simple services to the high grade services, from the services for desktops, laptops, servers to websites in Vietnam.

Pham Trieu Linh, a senior executive of FPT Information, said that Symantec is now the leading partner of FPT in choosing the solutions which can bring high values to customers.

In order to step up its business in Vietnam, Mr Raymond Goh said, the firm will focus on showing the importance of security solutions for enterprises, help partners and customers understand and access the technologies and services on information security and management.

Symantec has highly appreciated the potentials of the Vietnamese market based on the high growth rate of the national economy, the rapid increases of Internet subscriber density. It has also conducted its own survey on the readiness to respond to the risks that may lead to the disasters of small and medium enterprises.

According to Symantec, despite the warnings, most Vietnamese small and medium enterprises have not got ready to respond to disasters.

50 percent of polled small and medium enterprises said that dealing with information security is not considered the top priority for them. Less than 50 percent of the polled enterprises said they make information backup weekly or regularly, and only 30 percent do this every day.

Experts believe that security service market in Vietnam is a fertile land, while there are not many cultivators. There have been a lot of security holes which have been existing at Vietnamese institutions and enterprises and have not been fixed.

Statistics show that in the first eight months of the year, it is estimated that more than 4.7 million computers in Vietnam infected with viruses with the penetration of 4200 new lines of viruses. Meanwhile, 156 websites of institutions and enterprises in Vietnam were reportedly hacked.

SaigonCTT has also pointed out that a lot of holes have existed in the networks of agencies, ministries, branches and enterprises due to the lack of network security experts, while managers of the companies still do not pay much attention to the security.

Le Bach Tung, EC-Council’s lecturer at Saigon CTT, expressed his concern about the audacity and the high skills of hackers. In Vietnam, in May and June 2011, hackers carried out continued attacks to the server of FPT Distribution, 200 websites in Vietnamese language, 10 of which are belonging to Government’s agencies.

Most recently, 85,000 computers in Vietnam were attacked. This recalled the attack of the hackers in March 2010, where they used the computers in Vietnam like the bonnets to attack Google and other companies.