Organizations worldwide are on track to spend a cumulative $86.4 billion on information security products this year, a 7 percent increase over 2016, Gartner reports. The research firm anticipates that figure will climb to $93 billion in 2018.

The IT-focused advisory firm projects fast growth for the security testing market. Despite the relatively small base, the infrastructure-protecting segment continues to suffer data breaches, fueling demand for application security testing.

“Spending on emerging application security testing tools, particularly interactive application security testing (IAST), will contribute to the growth of this segment through 2021,” says Gartner.

Services go up, hardware goes down

By far the fastest growing segment, however, remains security services – namely, IT outsourcing, consulting and implementation

Looking ahead, Garner analysts anticipate that growth of hardware support services will slow. The culprit? Virtual appliances, public cloud and Software as a Service.

However, Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner, warns that tight security doesn’t just mean spending more on new technologies – although this aspect is key in building strong defenses around a business.

“Organizations can improve their security posture significantly just by addressing basic security and risk related hygiene elements like threat centric vulnerability management, centralized log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening,” Deshpande says.

A Bitdefender survey of 250 IT decision makers in the United States found that only 64 percent of cyberattacks could be stopped, detected or prevented with current resources. This, even though nine in 10 IT decision makers see security as a top priority for their business. The problem most often arises from tight budgets. The survey found that cloud security spending had surpassed the amount spent on physical security (from the total IT budget).

But Gartner reports other interesting findings.

General Data Protection Regulation

A hot topic in the IT media – and one that will continue to pick up steam as we edge closer to May 2018 – the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has ignited what Gartner calls “renewed interest” in security spending. The GDPR alone will drive some 65 percent of data loss prevention buying decisions through 2018, Gartner estimates.

The GDPR mandates that any business that collects personally identifiable information keep that information safe. Hefty fines will be dished out to companies that fail to prevent data breaches. The new legislation will take effect in May next year. The UK is drafting similar regulations to stay on par with the rest of the world when it exits the European Union.

Gartner also forecasts that 40 percent of all managed security service (MSS) contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing (ITO) projects by 2020. That’s double today’s figure of 20 percent. And by 2021, 80% of Chinese businesses will deploy made-in-China network security solutions.