Worldwide IT security spending to hit US$90 billion in 2017

Worldwide IT security spending to hit US$90 billion in 2017

Gartner predicts firms will improve their cyber threat detection and response capabilities

Rebecca Gibson |


Worldwide spending on information security is to rise by 7.6% to hit US$90 billion in 2017 and US$113 billion by 2020, according to Gartner.

Gartner’s Market Insight: Security Market Transformation Disrupted by the Emergence of Smart, Pervasive and Efficient Security report predicted that enterprises will invest in improving their cyber threat detection and response capabilities from 2017-2020.

“The shift to detection and response approaches spans people, process and technology elements and will drive a majority of security market growth over the next five years,” said Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner. “While this does not mean that prevention is unimportant or that chief information security officers (CISOs) are giving up on preventing security incidents, it sends a clear message that prevention is futile unless it is tied into a detection and response capability.”

The need to better detect and respond to security incidents has created new security product segments, such as deception, endpoint detection and response solutions, software-defined segmentation, cloud access security brokers, and user and entity behaviour analytics.

These new segments are creating net new spending, but are also taking spend away from existing segments such as data security, enterprise protection platform network security and security information and event management.

As enterprises shift toward balancing prevention with newer detection and response approaches, CISOs are changing how they measure the success of their security strategy. All security investments are being measured on how they contribute to the shift in mindset. Even preventive security controls, such as firewalls, application security and intrusion prevention systems, are being tweaked to provide more intelligence into security operations, analytics and reporting platforms.

“CISOs are keen to communicate the return on investment of their security strategy in terms of the business value associated with quick damage limitation, in addition to threat prevention and blocking,” said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner. “The key enabler for CISOs in this endeavour is to get visibility across their security infrastructure to make better decisions during security incidents. This visibility will enable them to have a more strategic and risk-based conversation with their board of directors, CFO and CEO about the direction of their security programme.”

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