Aussie InfoSec spending to top $2.8 billion this year

Information security products and services spending is set to reach $2.8 billion this year in the Australian market, up by 2.5 per cent from 2016, according to analyst firm, Gartner.

The Australian enterprise market maintains the largest portion of spending on security services in the local market, including IT outsourcing, implementation and consulting, Gartner's research showed. Meanwhile, the consumer space is set to represent less than four per cent this year.

Globally, the market will increase by seven per cent from 2016, to US$86.4 billion. In 2018, Gartner expects this figure to hit US$93 billion.

Security testing and services have been marked as the fastest growing markets, mainly due to continued data breaches and demand on application security testing. Spending on emerging application security testing tools, particularly interactive application security testing (IAST) will also contribute to growth, Gartner said.

Despite this, growth in hardware support services will slow down due to the adoption of virtual appliances, public cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), which will reduce the need for attached hardware support overall, Gartner said.

The analyst firm also forecasts that by 2020, 40 per cent of all managed security contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing projects, compared to 20 per cent this year.

“Improving security is not just about spending on new technologies. As seen in the recent spate of global security incidents, doing the basics right has never been more important,” Gartner principal research analyst, Sid Deshpande, said.

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

Australian firms are consistently facing pressure to have an effective security strategy as attackers become more sophisticated.

The recent WannaCry ransomware attack crippled organisations across 150 countries with an economic price tag of about $US4 billion.

 A report by the Australian Cyber Security Centre revealed that some organisations were being targeted by cyber criminals up to hundreds of times each day.