VoIP adoption helping drive security appliance market

While VoIP offers attractive, new functionality for business communications, companies may need to deal with security challenges to gain the benefits of the technology, In-Stat researchers said.

Consequently, more than 75 percent of companies that have deployed VoIP plan to replace their security appliances within the next year, they said.

In-Stat forecasts that the security appliance market will reach $7 billion by 2009.

"Traditional firewall technologies can complicate several aspects of VoIP, most notably dynamic port trafficking and Network Address Translation (NAT) transveral," In-Stat analyst Victoria Fodale said in a statement.

"Security product vendors are adding functions that address voice applications in their products, but as history has shown, security typically lags behind advances in technology," she added.

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