The information security market is in a continuous state of consolidation, yet it is never fully consolidated. Over and over, we see security startups with clever technologies thrive, grow and then get purchased by one of a handful of Infosec giants, only to be replaced by the next bunch of innovative security startups.

In the last few months alone, McAfee, which was itself acquired by Intel in 2011, bought next-generation firewall vendor Stonesoft; Cisco purchased security vendor Sourcefire, the company behind the open source Snort intrusion prevention system; and IBM acquired anti-malware vendor Trusteer.

Plenty of new technologies are being developed by companies in Silicon Valley and around the world right now, and many of them are bound to end up being integrated into the security offerings of larger companies.

Among the hottest areas are application and data virtualization/containerization, data encryption and tokenization and secure authentication. Paul Rubens, writing for eSecurity Planet, has identified some of the most exciting startups to keep an eye on.