The increased adoption of mobile, social and cloud computing is driving growth in security spending among organisations that are also becoming more aware of threats on all those fronts.
Worldwide spending on information security will top $71 billion (€53.8 billion) this year, an increase of 7.9% over 2013, with the data loss prevention segment recording the fastest growth at 18.9%, according to research firm Gartner.
Research director Lawrence Pingree pointed to what he called the “democratisation” of security threats, with malicious software tools that can be used to launch advanced attacks now more broadly available online via an underground economy. While this has made life even more difficult for CISOs, it has also resulted in increased awareness. Security is no longer seen as just an IT function or a cost centre, he said.
Organisations are shifting existing resources away from security device administration and monitoring, toward mitigation and incident response.
The growing popularity of hosted applications and infrastructure is also changing the security sector. In 2015, roughly 10% of overall IT security enterprise capabilities will be delivered as a cloud service, Gartner said. Small and medium sized companies will rely on hosted security services to an even greater extent.
Unfortunately, many organisations continue to lack staff with the appropriate security skills. To keep up with hackers, more than half of organisations will by 2018 rely on security services firms that specialise in data protection, risk and infrastructure management, according to Gartner.
Regulatory compliance has been a major factor driving spending on security in the last three years, particularly in the US, according to Gartner. Privacy and data protection laws in various stages of implementation or planning in Australia, the European Union, Singapore and Malaysia will further help drive growth.
Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service
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