The overall spend on security hardware, software and services will increase an impressive 38% by 2020, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
The analyst firm forecasts that worldwide revenues will grow from $73.7 billion in 2016 to $101.6 billion in 2020. That works out to a compound annual growth rate of 8.3%, which is more than twice the rate of spending in IT overall.
Security-related services will account for 45% of spending worldwide this year, with managed security services leading the way with revenues of $13 billion. Software spending will come in second, with endpoint security, identity and access management, and security and vulnerability management software driving more than 75% of the category's revenues. That will be followed by security hardware revenues of $14 billion, led by purchases of unified threat management systems.
One of the fastest growing segments of the security products market will be user behavior analytics software, with a CAGR of 12.2%.
“Today’s security climate is such that enterprises fear becoming victims of the next major cyberattack or cyber-extortion,” said Sean Pike, the vice president of security products IDC. “As a result, security has become heavily scrutinized by boards of directors demanding that security budgets are used wisely and solutions operate at peak efficiency.”
But while researchers pointed to a climate of fear driving the investments, some wonder if the spending is being devoted to the right priorities.
“Something is wrong here: we cannot continuously increase our cybersecurity budget and get instantly and more frequently hacked in parallel,” said Ilia Kolochenko, from web security firm High-Tech Bridge, via email. He continued to point out that too often, “companies spend their budgets on new technologies, before conducting holistic and comprehensive risk (re)assessment in order to understand which risks and threats they need to mitigate and in which priority. Cybersecurity management is not rocket science.”
IDC’s sector growth allocations predict that the banking vertical will spend $8.6 billion, followed by discrete manufacturing, government and process manufacturing. These four industries account for 37% of global security revenues this year, and will maintain that lead in share of spend through to the next decade, the report said.
The healthcare vertical meanwhile will see a 10.3% CAGR, followed by telecommunications, utilities, state/local government, and securities and investment services all hitting CAGRs above 9% over the period.
Photo © Stuart Miles