The market for enterprise security is growing at its highest rate ever in Europe, according to analyst firm Canalys.

Last year the market grew 49 per cent year-on-year to €536m, with Cisco dominating with 21 per cent of the market. Nokia is the fastest growing vendor, however, with sales increasing by over 90 per cent on the quarter.

"The security market is poised to extend its impressive track record into 2005 and beyond," said Andy Buss, senior analyst at Canalys.

"Our expectation is that 2005 will be up by more than 15 per cent over 2004. Vendors need to continue the pace of innovation and integration, partnering where necessary to ensure short time to market and to develop industry-wide interoperability."

The biggest growth area has been in security hardware, with 65 per cent year-on-year increases. This is part of a wider move to build security into the network at a hardware level.

The reseller channel has also proved important. Juniper saw its sales grow 57 per cent after an intensive channel support programme, and the Canalys research found that the channel as a whole benefited towards the end of the year as companies started spending the last of their annual budgets.

The findings contradict statements made by Gartner last month that this year would see the start of a decline in security spending.