"As a result, vendors may need to balance issues around cost of sale to gain market share."

E-mail pipelines will continue to be a favorite target for malicious attacks at a time when IT departments are tasked with preventing information leakage, meeting compliance standards and ensuring spam does not clog networks, servers and in-boxes.

As much as 80 percent of e-mail is spam and IDC believes that more than three-quarters of all corporate machines are infected with various forms of spyware.

CipherTrust ANZ regional manager Robert Jones says not all messaging security threats are inbound.

"Solutions need to cover outbound threats to cover compliance, intellectual property and theft of confidential information," he said.