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Worldwide information security spending to grow 7.9% this year to reach US$81.6 billion: Gartner


August 9, 2016   by Canadian Underwriter


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Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach US$81.6 billion this year, an increase of 7.9% over 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company based in Stamford, Conn.

Secure system conceptConsulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security, Gartner said in a press release on Tuesday. However, until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Gartner predicts that by 2018, 90% of organizations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50% today. Organizations have been deploying DLP to address regulatory compliance, intellectual property protection and data visibility and monitoring. Newer solutions that include user entity and behaviour analytics, image analysis, machine learning and data-matching techniques are being used to augment existing solutions, Gartner said in the release.

Another finding in Gartner’s Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 1Q16 Update is that the average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2-3% year-over-year until the end of 2018. “This is driven by the market benefiting from higher demand for high-end equipment among cloud providers and other service providers, due to larger bandwidth needs and an increasing number of devices,” Gartner explained in the release. While vendor competition continues to put pressure on pricing, enterprises, service providers and web-scale organizations are moving toward deploying bigger and more expensive firewalls, Gartner added. As a result, the deployment of large firewalls by cloud service providers will remain an important source of revenue growth for vendors.

Gartner also forecasted that public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10% 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, the release said, noting that SaaS is the first choice for only 16% of chief information officers surveyed by Gartner in 2015.

By 2019, Gartner suggested, half of midsize and large organizations will add bigger, more advanced inspection-oriented features to their network firewalls. “Organizations are looking to firewalls to consolidate other features, such as web filtering and intrusion prevention capabilities,” the release said. “Some are enhancing their firewalls with new content inspection features, such as malware sandboxing.”

Overall, 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 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% through 2020 as organizations focus on detection and response.

“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, in the release.


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