The market size of the Japanese Secure Content Management market is estimated to be USD 342.67 Million in 2018 and is expected to grow at a meager CAGR of 2.8%, to reach a market size of USD 415.75 Million in 2025
- Definition / Scope
- Market Overview
- Market Risks
- Top Market Opportunities
- Market Drivers
- Market Restraints
- Industry Challenges
- Technology Trends
- Regulatory Trends
- Other Key Market Trends
- Market Size and Forecast
- Market Outlook
- Technology Roadmap
- Distribution Chain Analysis
- Competitive Landscape
- Competitive Factors
- Key Market Players
- Strategic Conclusion
- References
- Appendix
Definition / Scope
The Protection of a company against virus, spam and undesirable web pages to not only providing enhanced security but also addressing productivity and human resource issues is the primary role of Secure Content Management
Information can enter your network even after proper perimeter security and limiting the avenues of information traversal. there still exists the need to filter further as attackers continue to find ways to “piggyback” across valid communication channels. Reasons for a secure content management solution include:
- Lost productivity
- Introduction of malicious code
- Potential liability
- Wasted network resources
- Control over intellectual property
- Regulatory Compliance
The security of external-facing infrastructure is critical for organisations when considering the security of their network as a whole. Even if external-facing infrastructure does not host sensitive information, there is still a significant risk to the reputation of organisations if external-facing infrastructure is tampered with.
Secure Content Management solutions are gaining traction due to the increased need for handling voluminous content that is getting generated in organizations on a daily basis. The rising adoption of digitalization, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), growth of e-commerce, and social media has increased the amount of content generated in inter-organizations and intra-organizations.
SCM solutions offer clients with the benefit of paper-free workflow, accurate searching of required information, and better information sharing, and also addresses required industry standards and regulations. SCM solutions enable clients with handling essential enterprise information, and save time and cost associated with searching for the required business data for making key business decisions.
Security vulnerabilities within content management systems (CMS) installed on web servers of organisations are often exploited by adversaries. Once a CMS has been compromised, the web server can be used as infrastructure to facilitate targeted intrusion attempts.
Japan witnessed meagre growth in the Secure Content Management market. There was an increase in SCM adoption of integrated security appliance, such as UTM or next-generation firewall appliances, instead of stand-alone SCM solutions.
Moreover, the Japanese SCM market has a highly competitive vendor landscape and recorded low price competitiveness in 2017. As the Japanese email security market is highly saturated, there were few greenfield opportunities, which indicated that replacement deals contributed to the majority of the revenue.


Market Overview
- USD 342.67 Million – Market revenue of Secure Content Management market in Japanese in 2018.
- 2.1% – The growth rate recorded by email security segment in 2018
- USD 105.18 Million – Market Revenue of email security segment in 2018
- Email – the popular attack vector as an initial entry point for cyber-attacks that are targeting organizations in the region.
- Spamming, Phishing, Spoofing, and Business email Compromise (BEC) – The Common attacks encountered in Japan in 2018
- 4.2% – CAGR growth rate of Web Security Solutions segment in 2018
- USD 220.17 Million – Market Revenue generated from Web Security Solutions in 2018
- Based on Organization size. Large enterprises with a market share of around 65% held the dominant position in 2018 and are expected to continue with its growing trend until 2025 and further.

Market Risks
Increased complexities in network infrastructure
Network architectures are becoming more distributed and complex. Where networks were once largely built around isolated data centers, they now connect with the cloud, applications, and various IoT devices. This trend promises to continue moving forward, with the number of connected devices in use expected to grow to 125 billion by 2030. While distributed networks built around different ecosystems, such as physical or cloud environments, present many opportunities, there are numerous ways in which they also create risks for the customers.
Complex networks have more entryways and points of interaction than ever for cybercriminals to target, making it more likely they will be able to find a vulnerability to exploit, that inconsistent security measures can slip, and that threats can spread rapidly once the perimeter has been compromised.
Malware
Malware, or malicious software, is any program or file that is harmful to a computer user. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and spyware. These malicious programs can perform a variety of functions, including stealing, encrypting or deleting sensitive data, altering or hijacking core computing functions and monitoring users’ computer activity without their permission.
The risk involved includes uploading of malware to the web server to facilitate remote access, for example, web shells or remote administration tools (RATs) (Akamai: Web Shells, Backdoor Trojans and RATs)
Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of malicious software from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim’s data or perpetually block access to it unless a ransom is paid. While some simple ransomware may lock the system in a way which is not difficult for a knowledgeable person to reverse, more advanced malware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion, in which it encrypts the victim’s files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them.
In a properly implemented cryptoviral extortion attack, recovering the files without the decryption key is an intractable problem – and difficult to trace digital currencies such as Ukash and cryptocurrency are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan that is disguised as a legitimate file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment.
However, one high-profile example, the “WannaCry worm”, traveled automatically between computers without user interaction.
Top Market Opportunities
Adoption of Cloud-first strategy in Security
Enterprises are shifting their preference from on-premise solutions to cloud-based security solutions because of the large investments and in-house expertise required in the case of on-premise solutions. This is specifically seen in the case of SMBs that prefer cloud-based solutions.
Amalgamation of Advanced Technologies
Email security vendors are developing their solutions with machine learning technologies to make the solutions learn and adapt themselves; this helps increase protection efficiency. In addition, vendors are also trying to provide their solutions with cloud services. Local vendor, Kiwontech, is providing SCM Cloud, which integrates email security solutions with anti-fraud solutions.
Integrated Security solutions
Customers are expecting at solutions to be integrated with other security features, such as DLP, authentication, advanced malware detection, AEDR, UEBA to protect businesses from malware-born emails and embedded malicious URLs, businesses are showing less demand for standalone legacy SCM solutions, but looking at a more integrated security approach toward email and Web security.
Market Drivers
email and Web gateways risks
The email and web gateway faces risk of intrusion when the attacker tries to hack the system. This can be avoided by using Secure Content Management solutions such as SWG Proxies, SSL and firewalls. SWG Proxies identifies the threat in the web traffic that would otherwise be found by firewalls and other stream-based security solutions. SWG proxy will eliminate all threats and monitors the entire session.
It is the only viable solution to uncover and stop attacks before they occur. Constantly monitoring and incorporating new attack signatures into detection capabilities. Web-Intelligence tools that is augmented with latest file, email and threat intelligence will provide superior efficacy to uncover attacks. The risks associated with email and web gateways push organizations to adopt Secure Content Management solutions.
Increased awareness of the threat landscape
The threat landscape has changed significantly from simple cyber-attacks to massive ransomware attacks. As the complexities of threats are increasing so is the need for complexity of tools that deal with the security attacks. The evolution of threats and attacks has created more awareness on the threat landscape and hence has created imminent need for adoption of Secure Content Management solutions.
Stringent regulatory norms
The recently legislated basic act on Cybersecurity provides elaborate regulations and definitions on legal liability. The basic act on Cybersecurity emphasises on the protection of all kinds of information be it sensitive or non-sensitive and also lays framework on the implementation of email and web gateways. Hence Organisations are compelled to abide by the basic act on Cybersecurity and hence are prompted to adopt secure content management services. Strict compliance requirements drive investments in security to prevent litigation and legal liabilities and in turn drive adoption of cybersecurity.
High need for protection against data loss
With more data being created in and sent to the cloud every day, it is more important than ever to have a set of consistent Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies that protect data everywhere it lives—in the cloud and on corporate endpoints, networks, or even unmanaged devices. Secure Content Management extends policies from the devices to the cloud, providing a seamless data protection experience across multiple environments.
Increasing adoption of mobility in the workplace
Because of the advantages offered by mobility such as increased collaboration, improved flexibility, enhanced communication, tailored user experience, reduced talent churn and increased revenue potential, employees are embracing mobility for their work. Increasing adoption of mobility in the workplace requires organizations tighten control over online content to enhance productivity and to prevent threats.
Market Restraints
Issues with functional content data silos
Data silos are bad and should be eradicated. Unfortunately, after decades of criticism and proposed solutions, silos remain stubbornly intact at all too many organizations, impeding the free flow of data and strangling analytics. The voluminous accumulation of data in a single storage location is an headwind in accessing and managing the data This acts as a restraint for the adoption of Secure Content Management.
Persistence of constant evolving threats
The constant evolution of complexity of the threats such as phishing attacks, targeted malware and ransomware such as NotPetya and WannaCry serves as restraint for the adoption of Secure Content Management as it involves delegating secured information to third-party vendors.
Handling of Sensitive data
For the initiation of Secure Content Management Customers are required to share their Information with the SCM provider, the information shared includes Sensitive data such as banking information and health information. Due to security and compliance reasons Customers shy away from sharing sensitive data with the Secure Content Management service provider.
Industry Challenges
Security issues associated with cloud and mobile technologies
The risks associated with cloud computing such as weak cloud security measures of the services such as storing data without controls such as encryption, or lack of multi-factor authentication to access the service. With organisations encouraging employees to adopt policies such as Bring Your Own Device, the risks associated with mobile devices are multi-fold which includes Mobile devices have threats from malware, threats based on device vulnerabilities, and threats associated with data theft. The risks associated with cloud and mobile technologies pose challenge in the implementation of Secure Content Management services.
Migration of data from legacy systems to new systems
Data migration from legacy systems such as databases and data warehouses to new systems is the main and the painful process involved in the process of migrating to Secure Content Management. This is the pain-point as it consumes more time in the form of man-hours and the complexity involved in the form of portability and the operability of the platform used for the migration of data. Hence, this acts as a Challenge.
Lack of Skilled Professionals
SCM implementation requires higher level of technical proficiency and expertise, as the threat environment is evolving, so does the need for equipping technical skills to counter the threats. The shortage of skilled labour is a challenge for the implementation of SCM solutions.
Technology Trends
Offering of Cognitive & Analytical Capabilities
- In 2018, we will see more and more content management software providers adding artificial intelligence and natural language technologies to their platforms through acquisitions in an effort to simplify unstructured content management and related processes. Some of the benefits of utilizing cognitive analytics include:
- Predict a likelihood of conversion through a particular content before it is even published.
- Understand which content topic is the most relevant for each customer across channels through the integration with customer relationship management systems and marketing automation systems.
- Deliver user-specific content experiences via metadata that can help them retrieve every occurrence of a specific type of content, such as all product descriptions, positioning statements, value propositions, setup instructions, etc.
- Eliminate biased decision making processes by taking the guesswork out of what content to produce and which platform to be on.
Omnichannel Drives Experience-as-a-Service (EaaS)
Considering content is the heart and soul of every strategy, omnichannel marketing strategy has become one of the main focus areas for technology providers as well as content creators.
Though personalization, micro experiences, machine learning and omnichannel sound like buzzwords, the underlying idea of orchestrating them through a single platform may help organizations set their businesses up to remain with or ahead of the curve not only in 2018 but also over the next 5 years.
Adaptive Process Isolation
As the pace of business and the need for collaboration persist to accelerate, companies are struggling with managing and protecting their sensitive content as well as enabling their expanding teams to collaborate on the same project in real time.
On top of that, with cybercriminals becoming more sophisticated and organized, businesses are inevitably faced with data security issues at some point, and sometimes even many large enterprises fail at securing their intellectual property. Adaptive Process isolation comes out as a solution for the rising sophistication of threats
Regulatory Trends
Basic Act on Cybersecurity
The Basic Act aims to promote cybersecurity policy by stipulating basic principles of national cybersecurity policy; clarifying the responsibilities of the national and local governments and other concerned public parties; stipulating essential matters for cybersecurity-related policies such as the formation of cybersecurity strategy; and establishing the Cybersecurity Strategic Headquarters, among other things.
Under the amended Act, the government will set up a council that discusses the promotion of cybersecurity measures. The council will consist of national government agencies, local governments, critical information infrastructure operators, cyberspace-related business entities, and educational and research institutions.
In addition, the amended Act will enable the Cybersecurity Strategic Headquarters to delegate part of its functions by Cabinet order to such entities as the Information-Technology Promotion Agency. The functions to be delegated include establishing standards for cybersecurity measures for national administrative organs; promoting the implementation of evaluative measures, including audits; and coordinating with relevant persons and entities in Japan and abroad when cybersecurity breaches and threats occur.
Other Key Market Trends
Lack of Cybersecurity Risk Assessment
According to government statistics, only 55 percent of Japanese companies conduct cybersecurity risk assessments, compared to roughly 80 percent in the United States and 65 percent in Europe. Similarly, only 27 percent of Japanese companies have a chief information security officer (CISO), a critical position that generally oversees a company’s cybersecurity efforts. By comparison, 78 percent of U.S. companies and 67 percent of European companies have CISOs.
Japanese companies are ill prepared to confront cyber threats if just under half assess their risk and less than a quarter employ an advocate whose job it is to defend a company’s assets and identify security priorities.
Outbreak of WannaCry Ransomware
According to a 2017 survey, 46 percent of Japanese companies took measures to improve their cybersecurity primarily because they had experienced an incident. The WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017 is a case in point. It infected 2,000 computers at 600 organizations in Japan and disrupted their business operations.
Market Size and Forecast
- Japanese Secure Content Management solutions market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.8% in the period 2018 to 2025.
- Japanese Secure Content Management market had garnered market revenue of USD 342.67 Million in 2018.
- Email remains the popular attack vector as an initial entry point for cyber-attacks that are targeting organizations in the region.
- The email security segment recorded flat growth of 2.1% and market revenue of USD 105.18 Million in 2018
- The Common attacks in Japan in 2018 included Spamming, Phishing, Spoofing, and Business email Compromise (BEC).
- Based on Organization size. Large enterprises with a market share of around 65% held the dominant position in 2018 and are expected to continue with its growing trend until 2025 and further.
- Web Security Solutions recorded market revenue of USD 220.17 Million in 2018
- Web Security Solutions continued to experience stronger growth compared to email security posting a healthy CAGR of 4.2%

Market Outlook
- 2.8% – The expected CAGR of the Japanese Secure Content Management market in the period 2018 to 2025
- USD 415.75 Million – The expected market size of the Japanese Secure Content Management market in 2025
- USD 121.65 Million – The expected market size of the Japanese email security segment in 2025
- 4.2% – The expected CAGR of the Japanese Web Security Solutions in 2025
- USD 293.65 Million – The expected market size of the Japanese Web Security Solutions in 2025
- 65% – market share held by Large enterprises based on Organization size in the Secure Content Management market in 2018
- Hosted and cloud based deployment – maximum CAGR held among the deployment type in the forecast period (2018-2025).
- 30% – Market share held by banking and financial sector and has emerged as the dominating segment in the Japanese SCM market by vertical type.
- 22.6% – CAGR of Healthcare sector which is the highest during the forecast period (2018-2025).
Technology Roadmap
Machine Learning
To learn and adapt themselves email security vendors are developing their solutions with machine learning technologies; this helps increase protection efficiency. In addition, vendors are offering cloud services to improve their security performance. Machine learning can help businesses better analyze threats and respond to attacks and security incidents. It could also help to automate more menial tasks previously carried out by stretched and sometimes under-skilled security teams.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence is being used more and more in vendor security products and solutions. In cyber security training, for example, AI can be used to simulate attacks based on recent data compiled by recent incidents — making training courses as relevant as possible. AI systems can also monitor employees’ security awareness and provide information about what types of attacks would employees fall for, and where an organisation is more susceptible.

Distribution Chain Analysis
The Secure Content Management is offered in both stand-alone and Integrated platforms. As more and more customers tend towards the offering of SCM solutions in the form of Integrated solutions the Integrated Platforms is gaining prominence.
The solutions offered for Secure Content Management includes:
- Anti-Spam: Spam Filters are introduced for spam e-mail which not only consumes time and money, but also network and mail server resources.
- Web Surfing: Limiting the websites that end users are allowed to access will increase work productivity, ensure maximum bandwidth availability and lower the liability issues.
- Instant Messaging: Convenient and growing, but difficult to handle, this technology serves as a back door for viruses and worms to enter your network. It also provides way for sensitive information to be shared over the network.
Competitive Landscape
Market Positioning
The race for positioning of Market leader is gaining prominence among the Secure Content Management Service Providers, hence they offer differentiating products and services in the form of value-added service. The Service Provider that understands the need of the customer and offering solution for the same is expected to come out as the market leader.
Competitive Product Mapping
The offering of tools and services of higher quality encompassed with cutting-edge technologies that counter increasingly complex cyber-attacks is an alarming need of the customers and they expect the same to be offered by the Secure Content Management Service Providers.
Competitive Factors
Offering Value-added Services
The link between the Secure Content Management Service Providers and the consulting, Professional and Technical services is inevitable and imminent. Providing Consulting, Professional and Technical services is not a niche of the Secure Content Management Services Providers, unless the provider is to outshine the competition
Understanding Customer Requirements
Japanese Secure content Management providers should not be sensitive to the hype in the news. Successful providers are the ones that stay closer to the customers , thereby identify the requirements and issues of the customers and providing solutions. Although not attractive the service providers that stay closer to the customers are the most successful.
Uniqueness
Customers expect solutions that solves problem and not just add to the number of alerts to be addressed. The most successful Secure Content Management Services provider will with a unique solution attribution such as big data analytics or unique sensory data collection.
Key Market Players
Trend Micro is a Japanese multinational cyber security and defense company with global headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, a R&D center in Taipei, Taiwan, and regional headquarters in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The company develops enterprise security software for servers & cloud computingenvironments, networks, end points, consumers, and small & medium businesses. Its cloud and virtualization security products provide cloud security for customers of VMware, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle and vCloud Air.
Symantec is an American software company headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States. The company provides cybersecurity software and services. Symantec is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock-market index. The company also has development centers in Pune, Chennai and Bengaluru (India).
IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that protect enterprises against internet threats. It was best known for IronPort AntiSpam, the SenderBase email reputation service, and email security appliances. These appliances ran a modified FreeBSD kernel under the trademark AsyncOS. On November 24, 2003, IronPort acquired the SpamCop filtering and reporting service, which it ran as a stand-alone entity. Cisco Systems announced on January 4, 2007 that it would buy IronPort in a deal valued at US$830 million, and completed the acquisition on June 25, 2007.[6] IronPort was integrated into the Cisco Security business unit.
Canon IT Solutions Inc. is a Japanese company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, that offers IT services. The company offers the services of system integration, cloud computing, information security, and provides computer software mainly in Japan for enterprises, apart from Canon group. Canon IT Solutions is known that the company provides some characteristic software, for example, “Edian” is a DTP software for big size advertisement printing, “RubyNavigation” is a DTP software for putting ruby characters on Chinese characters, etc.
McAfee, LLC formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987–2014 and Intel Security Group from 2014–2017) is an American global computer security software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and claims to be the world’s largest dedicated security technology company
Clearswift is an information security company based in the UK. It offers cyber-security services to protect business’s data from internal and external threats. Clearswift extended the MIMEsweeper line to include web and instant messaging filtering. These were marketed as protecting against the leakage of confidential company information on social networking sites – Clearswift argues that instead of banning Web 2.0 sites and services entirely, businesses can actually gain a competitive advantage by making use of them, provided their use is monitored.
Barracuda Networks, Inc. is a company providing security, networking and storage products based on network appliancesand cloud services. The company’s security products include products for protection against email, web surfing, web hackersand instant messaging threats such as spam, spyware, trojans, and viruses. The company’s networking and storage products include web filtering, load balancing, application delivery controllers, message archiving, NG firewalls, backup services and data protection
Strategic Conclusion
The market size of the Japanese Secure Content Management market is estimated to be USD 342.67 Million in 2018 and is expected to grow at a steady CAGR of 2.8%, to reach a market size of USD 415.75 Million in 2025
Security issues associated with cloud and mobile technologies, Migration of data from legacy systems to new systems, Lack of Skilled Professionals are the challenges being faced by the Japanese SCM service providers.
Issues with functional content data silos, Persistence of constant evolving threats, Handling of Sensitive data are the restraints crippling the growth of the Secure Content Management market.
email and Web gateways risks, Increased awareness of the threat landscape, Stringent regulatory norms, High need for protection against data loss, Increasing adoption of mobility in the workplace are the driving factors for the growth of the Japanese SCM market.
Further Reading
- https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/malware
- https://www.csoonline.com/article/3240925/5-top-machine-learning-use-cases-for-security.html
- https://www.export.gov/article?id=Japan-Cyber-Security
- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/tag/cybersecurity/
- https://www.slashgear.com/japan-isnt-taking-cybersecurity-seriously-16553987/
- https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan-to-bring-forward-infrastructure-cybersecurity-review
- https://gettingthedealthrough.com/area/72/jurisdiction/36/cybersecurity-japan/
- http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/japan-basic-act-on-cybersecurity-amended/
- https://iclg.com/practice-areas/cybersecurity-laws-and-regulations/japan
- https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=aaea9a4f-6216-4cce-95ee-e889cb306b91
- https://www.nisc.go.jp/eng/pdf/cs-senryaku2018-zentaigaiyou-en.pdf
Appendix
- USD – US Dollar
- IoT – Internet of Things
- e-commerce – Electronic Commerce
- e-mail – Electronic Mail
- DLP – Data Loss Prevention
- SCM – Secure Content Management
- AI – Artificial Intelligence
- BYOD – Bring Your Own Device
- BEC – Business Email Compromise