Gartner: Global Security Spending Rises Nearly 5% Despite 'Commoditization'

Security spending remains hot -- to the tune of $75.4 billion worldwide this year -- but signs of a slowdown are showing in certain segments such as endpoint and protection platforms and consumer products, according to new data from Gartner.

The security analyst firm estimates a 4.7% increase in security spending in 2015 over last year, an increase mainly driven by government projects, legislative pressures, and the long shadow of major data breaches around the globe. But Gartner warns that saturation of more mature and established security tools hampering overall growth.

Bigger security budgets are the reality for nearly half of the enterprises recently polled in the Dark Reading/InformationWeek 2015 Strategic Security Survey, with security accounting for anywhere from 1% to 10% of annual IT budgets at half of the organizations in the survey.

Gartner research analyst Elizabeth Kim says cloud, mobile computing, the Internet of Things, and advanced targeted attacks are driving security technology demand. Kim says these technologies are driving spending in newer generation products such as endpoint detection and remediation, threat intelligence, and cloud security offerings such as encryption. Even so, these newer product purchases aren't enough to provide a sufficient bump to counter the flattening of the more mature and commoditized product sectors.

The firm expects the market to grow at a CAGR of 7.4% through 2019, with the hottest security sectors being testing, outsourcing, and identity access and management.

Meanwhile, the top four security products in most organizations are the same-old, same-old: firewalls (91%), spam filters (88%), antivirus (83%), and VPNs (81%), according to the InformationWeek/Dark Reading survey, with each down a percentage point or two from 2014.

Other findings by Gartner in its "Forecast Analysis: Information Security, Worldwide, 2Q15 Update": 

"There's been a tremendous DLP adoption wave," says Lawrence Pingree, research director and analyst for Gartner, who co-authored the report. "We're seeing greater integration of DLP," which accounts for the drop in the dedicated DLP space, he says. "We will still see DLP playing a role in the future."