Gartner forecasts that global spending on information security products and services will reach over $144 billion in 2018, an increase of 12.4% from last year.

In 2019, they predict an 8.7% growth to $124 billion, driven in part by an expected increase in spending to address digital business risks such as GDPR.

>See also: The financial impact of data breaches is just the beginning

“Security leaders are striving to help their organisations securely use technology platforms to become more competitive and drive growth for the business,” said Siddharth Deshpande, research director at Gartner.

“Persisting skills shortages and regulatory changes like the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are driving continued growth in the security services market.”

Data breaches: a catalyst for increased expenditure

According to Deshpande, due to the recent string of highly publicised data breaches, such as the recent attack on SingHealth that compromised the personal health records of 1.5 million patients in Singapore, privacy concerns are becoming the catalyst for increased expenditure.

A recent report from the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million, which is a 6.4% increase on last year.

>See also: The urgent need to ‘quantify the hidden costs of a data breach’

Gartner believes privacy concerns will drive at least ten per cent of the market demand for security services through 2019 and will impact a variety of segments, such as identity and access management (IAM), identity governance and administration (IGA) and data loss prevention (DLP).

Deshpande added: “Security and risk management has to be a critical part of any digital business initiative.”

Gartner also found that at least 30% of organisations will spend on GDPR-related consulting and implementation services through 2019.

Security as a service to increase

Gartner also predicts that security-as-a-service options are on their way to surpassing on-premise deployments. A significant proportion of respondents to the survey said that they plan to deploy specific security technologies, such as security information and event management.

“On-premises deployments are still the most popular, but cloud-delivered security is becoming the preferred delivery model for a number of technologies,” said Mr Deshpande.

>See also: What everyone should know about cyber security in the cloud

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