9/22/2009 -- It's official: Cisco Systems Inc. is tops in the intrusion prevention systems (IPS) segment, besting rivals Juniper Networks, IBM ISS, McAfee, Sourcefire and Symantec's TippingPoint.

All isn't sweetness and light for Cisco and other IPS players, however. According to many users, IPS systems are prohibitively difficult to maintain and update. That's caused a sizeable minority of shops to think twice before investing anew in intrusion prevention technologies, according to a new survey from market watcher Infonetics Research.

For the most part, however, shops believe in IPS. Most adopters deploy intrusion prevention-oriented technologies to safeguard their datacenters and -- perhaps just as important -- to limit or contain the impact of security issues.

"The top two drivers enterprises cite for deploying intrusion prevention systems are protecting datacenters and limiting the impact of security problems," said Jeff Wilson, a principal analyst for network security with Infonetics, in a statement.

Wilson foresees boom times ahead for the IPS segment. "The re-architecture of datacenters is top of mind for many large organizations, and security will be one of the very first considerations in a major datacenter overhaul, so it makes sense that this is a critical driver for large businesses to invest in IPS," he argues.

According to Wilson, almost 60 percent of survey respondents have already deployed (in-band) IPS devices. For the most part, Infonetics notes, respondents aren't overly concerned about managing false positives -- a known issue with in-band IPS technologies; just 15 percent cited concerns about false positives as a rationale for deploying IPS technologies out of band.

Intriguingly, one-third of respondents identified the challenges associated with keeping intrusion prevention technologies up to date as a "strong" reason not to invest in new IPS offerings. Perhaps because of this, nearly half (43 percent) of adopters are mulling IPS-as-a-service solutions. Of these, one-quarter said they'd probably opt to purchase IPS-as-a-service from a specialty (i.e., security) provider; slightly less (one-fifth) expressed a preference for a "major carrier."

Infonetics asked respondents to rank eight prominent IPS vendors with respect to technology, roadmap, security, management, value, pricing, stability and service. Cisco came out on top, followed by McAfee and then Juniper. --Stephen Swoyer