Gartner's latest findings reveal a burgeoning cybersecurity market that is in line with growing awareness following the recent spate of cybercrime and the imminent EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach USD$86.4 billion in 2017, a surge of seven percent from 2016. Furthermore, spending is expected to grow to a whopping $93 billion in 2018.
Within the infrastructure protection segment, Gartner has forecasted rapid growth in the security testing market due to the continued data breaches around the world and growing demand for application security testing as part of DevOps – spending on emerging application security testing tools will contribute to the growth of this segment through 2021.
The fastest growing segment remains with security services, particularly IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation services. Due to the growing adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software as a service (SaaS) editions of security solutions, hardware support services will see growth slowing the need for attached hardware software declines.
Principal research analyst at Gartner, Sid Deshpande says 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.
"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," says Deshpande.
"Organisations can improve their security posture significantly just by addressing basic security and risk related hygiene elements like threat centric vulnerability management, centralised log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening.
Unsurprisingly, the GDPR has created renewed interest in the industry, causing an overall panic and unease amongst organisations around the world.
Gartner asserts while organisations are working at strengthening their knowledge of the GDPR, those who have already implemented some form of data loss prevention (DLP) are figuring out what additional capabilities they need to invest in (including integrated DLP such as data classification, data masking and data discovery).
Finally, Gartner says managed security services (MSS) will continue their rapid ascent. By 2020, 40 percent of all MSS contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing (ITO) projects, up from 20 percent today.
This growth is being driven by organisations who are looking to security consulting and ITO providers that offer customisable delivery components that are sold with the MSS to deal with the complexity of designing, building and operating a mature security program in a short space of time.
Gartner asserts the large contract sizes associated with ITO and security outsourcing deals will drive significant growth for the MSS market through 2020.
