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Global Info Security Spending will Reach $81.6B in 2016

Protecting their organization from new cyber threats continues to be top-of-mind for the vast majority of CIOs. Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016 -- that's an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to the latest market study by Gartner.

Consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security. Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Preventive security will continue to show strong growth, as many security practitioners will have a buying preference for preventive measures. However, solutions such as security information and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways (SWGs) are evolving to support detection-and-response approaches. Gartner expects the SWG market will maintain its growth of 5 to 10 percent through 2020 as organizations focus on detection and response.

Enterprise Security Market Development

"Organizations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks," said Elizabeth Kim, senior research analyst at Gartner. "We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both."

According to the Gartner assessment, security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organizations continue to face staffing and talent shortages. That being said, artificial intelligence software and cognitive computing applications will likely alleviate the skills challenge over time.

Managed detection and response (MDR) is emerging, with demand coming from organizations struggling to deploy, manage and use an effective combination of expertise and tools to detect threats, and then bring their environment back to a known good state.

This is particularly true for targeted advanced threats and insider threats. With more MDR providers emerging targeting the midmarket, Gartner foresees these services being an additional driver for security spending for both large and smaller organizations.

Information Security Market Outlook

According to Gartner analysts, investment and spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways (SEGs) and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) continues to show constrained growth due to commoditization.

Furthermore, while software as a service (SaaS) adoption is growing, the effect on firewall spending will be limited for the next three years. SaaS is the first choice for only 16 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner in 2015.

Transitions also take time, during which vendors of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) will not only continue to evolve to cover more than just SaaS, but also perform similar roles for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

In addition, firewall vendors will also have to deal with one of their main challenges for the next few years: decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.

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