With the rise of personal devices being used for business purposes, mobile security has never been more important or necessary. According to a recent report from Infonetics (News - Alert) Research, the mobile security client market is continuing to grow, and will hit $2.9 billion by 2017.

In 2012, worldwide revenue for mobile security clients rose by an impressive 58 percent, reaching $964 million. While its first billion is just within reach, it should be achieving that with ease if it continues this rate of growth. Equally of note: the CAGR of consumer clients is growing rapidly and is expected to outpace that of enterprise clients, at 28 percent to 20 percent.

At the moment, there are plenty of players in the market, but none have taken a conclusive lead. With companies like McAfee, Citrix and Symantec (News - Alert) all competing, they provide plenty of options for customers, and plenty of cause for innovation. Of course, there are plenty of enterprise vendors with a horse in the SSL VPN race, including Cisco (News - Alert), Check Point and SonicWALL, all of which are expected to use mobile SSL VPN clients to get more involved in the mobile security client space.

“Real threats to mobile devices are active in the wild, pushing mobile security top of mind for enterprises and consumers looking to manage and protect the data and applications on their mobile devices,” said Jeff Wilson, Infonetics’ principal analyst for security. “Over the next five years, we anticipate that over seven billion new smartphones and tablets will ship worldwide, ratcheting up hackers’ interest in mobile devices. And as a result, we expect sales of mobile device security client software to soar, reaching $2.9 billion by 2017.”

As BYOD becomes more popular, more devices are being used to hold important work-related data and, thus, are both more at risk and in more need of protection. This means that there will continue to be demand for mobile security, and with it, hackers will continue to try and find ways around the new security.

It’s a never-ending struggle for supremacy, but as long as security can remain one step ahead of those who would threaten it, the mobile security market will remain strong.