CDSA

Gartner: Worldwide Information Security Spending Hits Record High (CDSA)

Reacting to increasing everyday cybersecurity threats, businesses and governments will spend a record $81.6 billion on information security products and services in 2016, an 8% jump from 2015, according to a Gartner study.

The biggest growth areas in information security products look to be security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP), with those three categories leading all security spending through 2020, according to Gartner.

Preventative security spending is growing in a big way, according to the report, with investments in measures like secure web gateways (SWGs) growing as much as 10% through 2020.

“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.”

Due to shortages of employees who have security know-how, more and more security spending with be service-driven, with advanced and insider being the main offerings organizations seek, according to the report.

Gartner forecasts that the average selling price for firewalls will jump as much as 3% each year through 2018, due to higher demand for the latest equipment among cloud and other service providers, and that by 2018, 90% of organizations will have integrated data loss prevention software into their systems, up from just 50% today.