Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 7.9% over 2015.
This is according to the latest forecast from market analyst firm Gartner, which notes 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), the firm says.
Gartner believes preventive security will continue to show strong growth, as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures. However, it notes, 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.
"Organisations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks," says Elizabeth Kim, senior research analyst at Gartner. "We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both."
Kim adds that security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organisations continue to face staffing and talent shortages. Managed detection and response (MDR) is emerging, with demand coming from organisations 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, she notes.
"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 organisations," she says.
According to Gartner, spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure e-mail gateways and endpoint protection platforms continues to show constrained growth due to commoditisation.
The firm points out the average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2% or 3% year-over-year until the end of 2018.
It explains 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. While vendor competition continues to put pressure on pricing, Gartner notes that enterprises, service providers and Web-scale organisations are moving towards deploying bigger and more expensive firewalls. As a result, the deployment of large firewalls by cloud service providers will remain an important source of revenue growth for vendors.
By 2018, 90% of organisations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50% today.
The market analyst firm says organisations 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, it adds.
It believes public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10% until the end of 2019 but will have an impact after that.
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