7/8/2008 -- If surging revenues are any indication, there's opportunity aplenty in the content security space. But established players like Cisco Systems Inc. had better be wary -- non-traditional powers (including Google Inc.) are hip to its promise, too.

According to market-watcher Infonetics Research, the worldwide market for managed security services could nearly double over the next three years, when (Infonetics projected) it will reach $13.8 billion.

The market-watcher's projections have at least some basis in empirical reality: Between 2006 and 2007, for example, the managed security services market grew at a 21 percent clip -- with about half of that revenue attributable to sales of managed firewalls. But the fastest growth, Infonetics reported, came from the content security segment.

"The emergence of non-traditional providers like Google and enterprise acceptance of software-as-a-service has boosted the opportunity for content security services, particularly in-the-cloud services, and these services are really driving the strong growth we forecast through 2011," said Infonetics analyst Jeff Wilson in a statement. "Meanwhile, in the managed encrypted VPN space, the drivers are still there (productivity improvements and costs savings combined with the complexity of deploying them), but MPLS is really starting to steal business away from encrypted site-to-site VPN services."

Elsewhere, Wilson and Infonetics projected, sales of content security services should triple over the same period. --Stephen Swoyer