Gartner Report Outlines Increased InfoSec Spending, With a Focus on Detection and Response

Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016, according to new reports from Gartner, Inc., an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015.

As of 2016, consulting and IT outsourcing are the largest categories of information security spending, says Gartner, but the analyst firm predicts that the highest growth in spending through 2020 will come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Gartner’s analysts also predict that preventive security will show strong growth, as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures over detection and response. However, Gartner sees that buying pattern changing in the near future, as solutions such as SIEM tools and secure web gateways (SWGs) evolve to support detection-and-response approaches. Gartner expects the SWG market will maintain a growth of 5 to 10 percent through 2020 as organizations target detection and response capabilities.

“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.”

Additionally, Ms. Kim said that security spending will become increasingly focused on services as organizations continue to face staffing and talent shortages. Managed detection and response (MDR) is emerging, with demand coming from organizations struggling 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. With more MDR providers emerging targeting the midmarket, Gartner foresees these services being an additional driver for security spending for both large and smaller organizations.

According to Gartner, spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways (SEGs) and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) continues to show constrained growth due to commoditization.