We were excited to read the Infonetics Data Center Security Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey, which was released yesterday. It revealed Cisco's continued leadership in a market that spans a multitude of vendors -application/database, client, data center integration and network. The report indicates that leaders need to offer the right mix of products across the data center security and cloud arenas as well as demonstrate security efficacy and integration into adjacent markets. Cisco has continued to execute on a unified security portfolio spanning firewalls, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), gateways, and integrated threat intelligence further complemented by strategic partnerships. Seamless integration and shared security intelligence with routing and switching (Nexus and Catalyst) and converged infrastructure (Cisco UCS) enables our customers to benefit from optimized traffic links, the highest levels of security resilience, increased availability and scalability as well as lower costs of ownership. Per the report, "to say you're the leader in the data center/cloud security is to say you are an innovator who can tackle the biggest problems in IT security for the biggest and most demanding customers."

We'd like to highlight two areas that Cisco has continued to demonstrate an outright lead over other vendors. In the area of perception as the top data center security supplier, Cisco leads with 47 percent of votes compared to IBM with 38 percent and McAfee with 28 percent, who ranked second and third. Cisco scored between 40 to 60 percent of respondents' votes (covering 10 criteria) for being the leading data center security supplier with McAfee scoring 15 points below Cisco, HP received around 20 percent of votes, and Juniper and Trend with 15 percent. 

Other notable findings include:

• Respondents spent an average of US$14.6M on security products for the data center in 2012, growing to US$16.9M in 2013 (a 16 percent increase).
• Seventy-nine percent of respondents indicated the most significant transformation affecting enterprise data centers today and driving the purchase of new security solutions is server virtualization, with the transition from private to public cloud, the need for performance and threat protection in an increasingly hostile landscape also ranking highly.
• Sixty-nine percent of respondents indicated that the need to gain access to high-speed network interfaces is a key purchase driver.
• More than half of the respondents plan to increase their spending in 10 different security technology areas over the next two years with antivirus/anti-malware topping the list.

The full Infonetics Report is available through subscription or through contacting Infonetics. It has some great criteria to keep in mind as you continue to make investments in data center security.