With each passing day, cyberattacks on businesses worldwide are seeing an all-time high, forcing the organizations to spend hefty monies to keep their as well as their customers’ data secure. Gartner, one of the world’s leading Market Research & Analytics company, recently conducted a survey on the expenditure on security products by organizations worldwide. As per the survey, spending on information security products & services will cross $114 billion in 2018, witnessing a 12.4 percent growth from last year, and is further expected to hit the $124 billion mark by 2019.

Commenting on the occasion, Siddharth Deshpande, Research Director, Gartner, says,“Security leaders are striving to help their organizations securely use technology platforms to become more competitive and drive growth for the business. 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 survey also identified security risks, business needs, and industry changes as the top drivers for security expenditure, and concerns related to data privacy will drive at least 10 percent market demand for security solutions in 2019. The major segments that are to expected to be affected by this are Identity & Access Management(IAM), Identity Governance & Administration (IGA), and Data Loss Prevention(DLP).

Other findings of the survey shows that Application Security segment topped the list in terms of growth ($310 million increased from 2018), followed by Cloud Security and Data Security segments which saw a $119 million and $500 million growth respectively. Additionally, Gartner has also identified a few specific aspects that will majorly impact security spending in 2018. A few among them are At least 30 percent of organizations will spend on GDPR related consulting and implementation services through 2019, and Risk management & privacy concerns within digital transformation initiatives will drive additional security expenses through 2020 for more than 40 percent of organizations. Also, Subscription & Managed Services will represent at least 50 percent of security software delivery by 2020.

“Highly publicized data breaches, like the recent attack on Sing Health that compromised the personal health records of 1.5 million patients in Singapore, reinforce the need to view sensitive data and IT systems as critical infrastructure. Security and risk management has to be a critical part of any digital business initiative. On-premises deployments are still the most popular, but cloud delivered security is becoming the preferred delivery model for a number of technologies,” adds Siddharth.