Next-gen firewall companies like FireEye may be feeling the pinch from fewer state-backed Chinese hacker attacks, but worldwide spending on security is still growing, according to analyst firm Gartner.
The analyst firm has forecasted year on year growth of 7.9 percent in 2016, with spending set to reach $81.6 billion this year, dominated by security consulting services and IT outsourcing.
Gartner says that shortages of cyber security talent will ensure that spending on security remains focussed on services such as managed detection and managed response services. Organisations that are more prone to nation-backed hackers and insider threats are finding it difficult to manage the right mix of people and technology to detect and remediate attacks, so they’re seek outside help, according to Gartner.
There’s little good news for the consumer antivirus market though, with the analyst firm expecting “constrained growth” in commoditised security technologies, such as consumer security software, secure email gateways and antivirus for PCs and mobile devices.
Gartner made a few assumptions to come up with its spending forecast, including that the average selling price for firewalls will continue to grow by two to three percent until the end of 2018.
This is in part due to a thirst among “web-scale organisations”, as well as enterprise and service providers, for expensive, high capacity firewall equipment. After the end of 2018 though, all bets are off for firewall revenues.
As businesses move more computing infrastructure to the cloud, the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform are offering firewall features as part of the service, such as AWS’s Web Application Firewall.
Gartner however doesn’t expect public cloud adoption to meaningfully impact firewall spending until 2019 by which time it expects so-called “cloud access security brokers” or CASBs to be playing a bigger role in security.
Microsoft last year acquired one of a handful of CASBs, called Adallom, which it’s now offering as Microsoft Cloud App Security. CASB broadly offers a means of controlling ‘shadow IT’ in the enterprise or the phenomenon of employees bringing their own cloud apps to work. The technology offers enterprise a way of managing these apps via policy settings.
Gartner expects that the CASB approach to cloud apps will be expanded to include infrastructure and platform services delivered via the cloud.
This will impact spending on firewall products, however Gartner reckons it will be several years before this takes effect.
The firm notes: “While software as a service (SaaS) adoption is growing, the effect on firewall spending will be limited for the next three years. SaaS is the first choice for only 16 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner in 2015. Transitions also take time, during which vendors of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) will not only continue to evolve to cover more than just SaaS, but also perform similar roles for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). In addition, firewall vendors will also have to deal with one of their main challenges for the next few years: decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.”
Gartner also sees significant growth in spending on technologies to prevent data leakage (DLP). Today around half of all businesses have DLP platform installed, but expects that to rise to 90 percent by 2018.