IT outsourcing, security testing and data loss prevention will be key growth areas as information security spend continues its growth globally.
Gartner is forecasting worldwide spend on security products and services to hit US$81.6 billion in 2016, a 7.9% year on year growth, with Australian spend forecast to hit almost AU$2.6 billion, up 6.2% on 2015's spend. No figures were available for the New Zealand market.
The analyst firm says its seeing a swing to demand for detection and responsive solutions, with security information and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways evolving to support detection and response approaches.
Gartner says it expects the secure web gateways market to continue growing at 5% to 10% our to 2020.
However, preventative security will continue to show ‘strong growth', Gartner adds, driven by security practitioners' continued buying preference for preventative measures.
Elizabeth Kim, Gartner senior research analyst, says “We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both [detection and responsive solutions and preventative solutions].
Continuing staff and talent shortages will help drive security services spend, with managed detection and response an emerging market as organisations struggle 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.
“This is particularly true for targeted advanced threats and insider threats,” Gartner says. “With more managed detection and response providers emerging targeting the mid market, Gartner foresees these services being an additional driver for security spending for both large and smaller organisations.
Meanwhile, increasing bandwidth is requiring larger-scale, higher-performing and more expensive firewalls, and organisations are also looking to firewalls to consolidate other features, such as web filtering an intrusion prevention capabilities, while some are enhancing their firewalls with new content inspection features such as malware sandboxing.
Those trends see Gartner forecasting that half of all midsize and large organisations will add ‘bigger, more advanced inspection features' to their network firewalls by 2019.
Gartner is forecasting solid growth for the data loss prevention market too, saying by 2018, 90% of organisations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP – up from 50% today – as they seek to address regulatory compliance, IP protection and data visibility and monitoring.
Newer solutions which include user entity and behaviour analytics, image analysis, machine learning and data-matching techniques are being used to augment existing solutions.
Public cloud adoption is also impacting firewall spending, though Gartner says the impact over the next three years is ‘limited', with SaaS first choice for only 16% of CIOs.
“Transitions also take time, during which vendors of cloud access security brokers will not only continue to evolve to cover more than just SaaS, but also perform similar roles for infrastructure as a service and platform as a service,” Gartner says.
“In the addition, firewall vendors will have to deal with one of their main challenges for the next few years – decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.
However, after 2019 Gartner says it expects public cloud adoption to begin to impact firewall spending more.
On the flip side, Gartner says spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways and endpoint protection platforms continue to show constrained growth due to commoditisation.