Sales of enterprise security products rose by nearly 20 per cent last year, according to the latest figures from Gartner.

The market was worth $10.4bn in 2007, up 19.8 per cent on 2006, the analyst firm estimated.

Symantec dominates the market with over 26 per cent market share, followed by McAfee with over 11 per cent.

"In 2007, the security market did not experience any noticeable signs of a slowdown as it showed double digit growth, up seven per cent from 2006," said Ruggero Contu, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"Compliance, data leakage and privacy issues, along with the need to tackle the fast evolving and sophisticated threat environment, are among the major drivers fuelling the growth of spending on security."

Email security boundary appliances showed the strongest growth at over 45 per cent. The slowest growing sector was enterprise antivirus software, as companies are increasingly switching to dedicated hardware appliances for protection.

Latin America is the fastest growing region with over 40 per cent sales growth. North America and Western Europe continued to lead the market with market shares of 47.5 per cent and 31.7 per cent respectively.