IT security increasingly focusing on reaction to attacks

Expenditures to grow 7.9 percent in 2016; detection, response spending lead the way, says Elizabeth Kim.


Worldwide spending on information technology security will grow by 7.9 percent, to reach $81.6 billion in 2016, according to Gartner.

In its latest market growth forecast, released last week, the research firm says the highest growth during that time will come in the areas of security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention.

One of the biggest changes will come in the area of security spending, according to Gartner analysts.

“Organizations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a prevention approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks,” noted Elizabeth Kim, senior research analyst at Gartner. “We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both.”



Still, preventive security will continue to show strong growth. But that spending will be joined by increased investments in security investment and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways (SWGs). With the growing focus on detection and response, Gartner predicts an increase in the SWG market of 5 to 10 percent through 2020.

Currently, the largest categories of spending on information security are in consulting and IT outsourcing. Those areas will continue to do well, as many organizations report staffing and talent shortages.

An emerging area of IT investments is managed detection and response (MDR). Organizations are looking to deploy, manage and use effective combinations of expertise and tools to detect threats, and they respond to them. Gartner noted this is especially true with targeted advanced threats and insider threats.

Organizations have been deploying data loss prevention tools to address regulatory compliance, intellectual property protection, and data visibility and monitoring. Gartner says new solutions that include user entity and behavior analytics, image analysis, machine learning, and data-matching techniques are being used to augment existing solutions.

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