Cybersecurity spending on track to top $150 billion in 2021

Cloud security spending tipped to increase from $595 million in 2020 to $841 million in 2021

The continuing impact of the global pandemic is driving demand for remote worker technologies and advanced cloud security, which is boosting spending on information security and risk management technology.

The market is expected to grow by over 12 percent this year to total $150.4 billion in 2021, according to the latest data from Gartner, a faster rate of growth than 2020 where spending increased by 6.4 percent.

While all market segments are growing at a solid rate, cloud security spending is set to rapidly increase from a relatively small base of $595 million in 2020 to $841 million in 2021, a growth rate of over 41 percent.

Security services including consulting, hardware support and implementation, by far the single largest category of spending, are on track to grow by just over 11 per cent this year to reach almost $72.5 billion worldwide.

“Organizations continue to grapple with the security and regulatory demands of public cloud and software as a service,” says Lawrence Pingree, managing research vice president at Gartner. “Looking ahead, we’re seeing early market signals of growing automation and further adoption of machine learning technologies in support of AI security. To combat attacks, organizations will extend and standardize threat detection and response activities.”

The most recent Gartner 2021 CIO Agenda Survey found that cybersecurity was the leading priority for new spending, as 61 per cent of the more than 2,000 CIOs who responded to the survey saying they will increase investment in cyber/information security this year.

As enterprises have been subjected to a range of new or enhanced cyber threats over the past year, spending on infrastructure protection and integrated risk management are two of the strongest performing market segments, growing at 16.8 percent and 12.6 percent respectively.