Global security and risk management spending growth to slow but remain positive in 2020: Gartner

Worldwide spending on information security and risk management technology and services will continue to grow through 2020, although at a lower rate than previously forecast, according to Gartner.

Information security spending is expected to grow 2.4% to reach USD 123.8 billion in 2020 (see Table 1). This is down from the 8.7% growth Gartner projected in its December 2019 forecast update. The coronavirus pandemic is driving short-term demand in areas such as cloud adoption, remote worker technologies and cost saving measures.

“Like other segments of IT, we expect security will be negatively impacted by the COVID-19 crisis,” said Lawrence Pingree, managing vice president at Gartner. “Overall we expect a pause and a reduction of growth in both security software and services during 2020.”

“However, there are a few factors in favor of some security market segments, such as cloud-based offerings and subscriptions, being propped up by demand or delivery model. Some security spending will not be discretionary and the positive trends cannot be ignored,” he said.

Source: Gartner (June 2020)

The ongoing shift to a cloud-based delivery model makes the security market somewhat more resilient to a downturn, with an average penetration of 12% of overall security deployments cloud-based in 2019, according to Gartner research. Cloud-based delivery models have reached well above 50% of the deployments in markets such as secure email and web gateways.

Networking security equipment including firewall equipment and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) will be most severely impacted by spending cuts this year. Consumer spending on security software is also forecast to decline in 2020.