Skip to main content

Information Security Spending will Reach $81.6B in 2016

The ongoing threat of cyber attacks on enterprise IT environments is driving new security-related investments. 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 worldwide 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 continue to 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.

Information 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."

Garner analysts believe that security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organizations continue to face staffing and skilled talent shortages.

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.

Cloud Impact on Information Security Trends

According to the Gartner assessment, public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10 percent until the end of 2019 but will have an impact after that. 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 -- as an example, decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.

Popular posts from this blog

How Applied-AI Impacts the Wearables Market

The wearable technology sector growth was largely a story about the smartwatch: a premium product anchored around a single wrist, sold at a steep price, and adopted primarily by the health-conscious and the tech-savvy. That narrative is now changing in ways that are genuinely interesting to anyone tracking the intersection of Applied-AI, consumer electronics, digital health, and connectivity infrastructure. The latest worldwide market study by ABI Research offers a timely and data-rich window into just how fast that transformation is unfolding. Wearables Market Development Wearable device shipments are projected to grow from 402.96 million in 2026 to 544.08 million by 2031, as vendors broaden access to advanced health, fitness, and connectivity features at more affordable price points. That is not incremental growth; it represents a meaningful expansion of who is wearing smart technology and why. Equally compelling is the revenue picture: the category is expected to generate $44.22 bil...