Global spending on information security is set to grow by close to 5% this year to top $75bn, according to the latest figures from analyst Gartner.
The market watcher put the final estimate at $75.4bn, a 4.7% increase on 2014, with the biggest growth areas in security testing, IT outsourcing, and identity and access management.
“Interest in security technologies is increasingly driven by elements of digital business, particularly cloud, mobile computing and now also the internet of things, as well as by the sophisticated and high-impact nature of advanced targeted attacks,” said research analyst, Elizabeth Kim, in a statement.
However, despite increased interest in emerging tech such as endpoint detection and remediation, threat intelligence, and cloud security, there is a much larger drop-off in spending in mature categories.
These include endpoint protection and consumer security – which are well established and beginning to see commoditization, the analyst claimed.
David Flower, UK managing director at Bit9 + Carbon Black, argued that not all of the endpoint security market was stalling.
“While I agree that the commoditization of anti-virus tools is going to impact endpoint security spend – particularly when vendors such as Microsoft are giving AV away for free – this is not representative of the whole endpoint security market,” he said.
“In fact, we are seeing growing demand for more intelligent endpoint security technologies as servers, point of sale, and user devices increasingly become the targets for hackers looking to exfiltrate data.”
Elsewhere, Gartner predicted that recent price increases of as much as 20% thanks to dollar appreciation will lead to many European organizations delaying security spend for the next quarter.
The analyst also claimed that, by 2018, the vast majority (85%) of network sandboxing purchases will be made in packages combined with content security and network firewalls. Sandboxing is a key tool for helping to spot and block advanced targeted threats.