Gartner identifies trio of factors impacting growth in security spending

“The pandemic accelerated hybrid working and the shift to the cloud,” asserted Ruggero Contu, senior director and analyst at Gartner, “challenging Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to secure what is now an increasingly distributed enterprise.”

Contu continued: “The modern CISO needs to focus on an expanding attack surface created by digital transformation initiatives such as cloud adoption, Internet of Things (IoT)/OT-IoT convergence, remote working and third party infrastructure integration. Demand for technologies and services such as cloud security, application security, zero trust network access and threat intelligence has been rising to tackle new vulnerabilities and risks arising from this exposure.”

End user spending on information security and risk management products and services is forecast to grow by 11.3% to reach more than $188.3 billion in 2023. Cloud security is the category forecast to have the strongest growth over the next two years.

As organisations increase their focus on environmental, social and governance issues, third party risk, cyber security risk and privacy risk, Gartner forecasts that the integrated risk management market will show double-digit growth through 2024 until greater competition results in cheaper solutions.

Security services including consulting, hardware support, implementation and outsourced services represents the largest category of spending, totalling $71.7 billion in 2022, and is expected to reach $76.5 billion next year.

Remote work continues to drive investment

Demand for technologies that enable a secure remote and hybrid work environment will increase beyond 2022. As organisations look to create secure work-from-home environments, they are exploring solutions that offer a quick return on investment. As a result, technologies such as web application firewalls, access management, endpoint protection platform and secure web gateway will witness short-term demand.

Rise of zero trust network access

Zero trust network access is the fastest-growing segment in network security, and forecast to grow by 36% in 2022 and then 31% in 2023, driven by the increased demand for zero trust protection for remote workers and organisations’ reducing dependence on virtual private networks for secure access. As organisations become familiar with zero trust network access, there’s a growing trend to use it not only for remote working use cases, but also for workers in the office.

Gartner predicts that, by 2025, at least 70% of new remote access deployments will be served predominantly by zero trust network access as opposed to virtual private network services, which is up from less than 10% at the end of 2021.

Shift to cloud-based delivery models

Due to multi-cloud environments, organisations face increased security risks as well as having to deal with the complexity of operating and managing multiple technologies. Gartner analysts suggest that this will lead to a push toward cloud security, while the market share of cloud-native solutions will grow.

The combined market for cloud access security brokers and cloud workload protection platform will grow by 26.8% to reach $6.7 billion in 2023. Demand for cloud-based detection and response solutions – among them endpoint detection and response and managed detection and response – will also increase in the coming years.

*Learn more by accessing ‘Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide’ and ‘Forecast: Information Security and Risk Management (Worldwide) 2020-2026: Q322 Update’

**The top priorities for security leaders in 2022 are outlined in the free-of-charge Gartner e-book entitled 2022 Leadership Vision for Security and Risk Management Leaders