Gartner has revealed that worldwide security spending is set to exceed $124 billion by the end of next year as businesses realise the potential security risks to their organisation and their business needs change.
Skills shortages are also having a big impact on the need for leaders to turn to technology platforms to prevent their organisations being attacked. Coupled with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) driving increased spending on data loss prevention and identity management systems, tech leaders are increasing spend on security to stay secure from both internal and external threats.
"Security leaders are striving to help their organisations securely use technology platforms to become more competitive and drive growth for the business," said Siddharth Deshpande, research director at Gartner. "Persisting skills shortages and regulatory changes like the EU's Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are driving continued growth in the security services market."
The sector most likely to be impacted by increased spend in the security sector is cloud security, which is set to increase by more than 148% between 2017 and 2019. Although it's still experiencing the lowest level of spending, reaching an estimated 304 million, the demand for cloud-based services will make a big difference in the security landscape this year and next.
Gartner has predicted that subscriptions and managed security services will represent half of all security software delivery by 2020, with as-a-service deployments surpassing on-premises and hybrid deployments in the coming years.
"On-premises deployments are still the most popular, but cloud-delivered security is becoming the preferred delivery model for a number of technologies," Deshpande added.
Data security will also see big gains over the next few years, with spending increasing by 37.5%, from $2.53 billion to $3.5 billion in two years.
