Worldwide IT Security Spending To Hit $86.4B This Year

Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $86.4 billion in 2017, marking a seven percent increase over 2016.

That’s according to market research firm Gartner, which said in its latest forecast that spending will grow to $93 billion in 2018. “Rising awareness among CEOs and boards of directors about the business impact of security incidents and an evolving regulatory landscape have led to continued spending on security products and services,” said Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner, said in a press release highlighting the results of its latest research.  “However, improving security is not just about spending on new technologies. As seen in the recent spate of global security incidents, doing the basics right has never been more important. Organizations can improve their security posture significantly just by addressing basic security and risk-related hygiene elements like threat-centric vulnerability management, centralized log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening,

Within the infrastructure protection segment, Gartner is forecasting fast growth in the security testing market due to continued data breaches and growing demands for application security testing. Spending on emerging application security testing tools, particularly interactive application security testing (IAST), will contribute to the growth of this segment through 2021, Gartner said. Security services will continue to be the fastest-growing segment, especially IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation services. However, hardware support services will see growth slowing, due to the adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software as a service (SaaS) editions of security solutions, which reduces the need for attached hardware support overall.

Gartner said by 2020, 40 percent of all managed security service contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing (ITO) projects, up from 20 percent in 2017. To deal with the complexity of designing, building and operating a mature security program in a short space of time, many large organizations are looking to security consulting and ITO providers that offer customizable delivery components that are sold with the MSS, Gartner said.