“Dear kids: If you want a job in 5 years, study computer science. If you want a job forever, study computer security.”
Four years on from this tweet by Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud company Box, the thriving security sector shows no signs of slowing down. At the intersection of security and cloud, a new sub-market has emerged: Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS).
SECaaS became a US$4 billion market in 2017, with double the growth compared to the rest of the security sector. This may have firmly established SECaaS in the United States, but security service companies shouldn’t overlook Europe in order to maintain growth in today’s digital age.
Despite Brexit fears, the latest figures show that EU economies grew at the fastest rate in a decade and the Eurozone is on course to continue to grow. The GDP of the single currency area expanded by 2.5 percent in the calendar year, the most rapid rate of growth since a 3.4 percent expansion in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis broke. It’s therefore no surprise that North American companies typically view Europe as a natural second market to address.
The big players in the security service market, like Cisco and McAfee, have already moved to the continent and are actively servicing European clients. With favourable market conditions and a growing global emphasis on cyber security, smaller vendors are also catching up and expanding their global footprints in response to worldwide demand for cloud-based services.
With a growing number of customers based outside of North America, a significant proportion of SaaS security companies are keen to serve users from infrastructures based in Europe. To achieve the best performance for your mission critical applications in a new market, it’s necessary to have a partner with a proven track record in operational excellence with dense connectivity to ensure the best possible reach, which is where we came in.
When a business is ready to expand to Europe, there are certain questions to consider. For example: do you want to be present across the whole of the continent or focus on a single site, and, how does the GDPR affect your organisation and the services you provide to customers? That’s what we can help with. Not only do our award-winning, accredited data centres give businesses plenty of capacity to scale and expand to multiple European locations, but we have dedicated teams to help companies with every step of their journey.
For security service companies looking to expand to Europe without building their own local data management facilities, colocation could be a good place to start, for example. Colocation can help your data-focused business with reducing the time it takes to market as well as saving costs and energy, without you having to start from scratch.
Get in touch with us today to find out how you can break into Europe, or learn more about the continent on the Gateway to Europe page of our website.
