As threats become more severe and complex, the demand for security information and event management tools will grow to more than $1 billion worldwide by 2015, according to an industry research firm.

The market for SIEM tools, which has been slow-growing for more than a decade, is about to get a shot in the arm, according to a report issued last week by Frost & Sullivan.

The study, "World Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Log Management Products Market," reports that the SIEM market earned revenues of $678.1 million in 2009 and predicts that this figure will hit $1.3 billion in 2015.

"Due to the recent economic downturn and the consequent cut in IT budgets and staff, SIEM and log management product demand has increased," says Frost & Sullivan research analyst Richard Martinez. "Financial institutions, government agencies, and others needed a solution that allowed them to stretch their capabilities and help lockdown their networks."

Enterprises are taking a closer look at products that incorporate multiple functions -- such as logging, reporting, network behavior analysis and alerts -- in an appliance or enterprise software, the report says. But high costs and an absence of data analysis capabilities have been holding enterprises back, experts say.

"SIEM's product visibility has improved with higher adoption; however, the high costs of deployment and the difficulty in quantifying its return on investment (ROI) have deterred its wide-scale adoption," the report says.

Joe Gottlieb, CEO of SIEM vendor SenSage, says the problem is a lack of data analysis capabilities.

"End users are frustrated with a general lack of flexibility, scalability, openness and depth of analysis in traditional SIEM and log management products," Gottlieb says. "Only a leading edge subset of the market has been able to overcome these barriers and apply a proactive, data-savvy approach to security management."

While most of the Fortune 500 companies already have a SIEM system running, the mid-market adoption is slower, due to the cost of a SIEM, Frost & Sullivan observes. "SIEM's definition and functions have become unclear, with feature sets increasing and varying by vendor," the report says.

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