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Cybersecurity: This is how firms are spending their budget this year

A tech security skills shortage, new threats and compliance demands are all pushing spending in fresh directions.
Written by Steve Ranger, Global News Director

Spending on security hardware, software, and services in Europe could reach $27.3bn this year, driven by new security threats, a lack of skilled staff, and GDPR and other compliance requirements.

Spending on security technology is likely to keep the same pace over the next few years to reach a total of $33.6bn by 2022, according to tech analyst IDC.

The three industries that will drive security spending in 2019 are banking, discrete, and process manufacturing, which together account for $9bn — a third of the total. Healthcare and manufacturing saw the fastest growth in security spending last year.

More than half of 2019 security spending in Europe will go on services – $14.8bn – followed by software – $8.6bn – and hardware – $3.9bn. Managed security services – $5.8bn – and integration services – $5.4bn – will account for the majority of services spending. Growth in managed security services for 2019 is expected to reach 14.2%, the fastest growth of all technology categories. Mark Child, European security research manager at IDC, said the level of security threats and the burden of defending against them is worsening the security skills shortage and driving organisations to invest in managed security services.

The other fastest-growing categories for 2019 will be security analytics, intelligence, response, and orchestration software (AIRO), which allows firms to make better use of the intelligence generated by both their internal monitoring and external feeds to respond better to incidents, and digital trust software.

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Image: IDC

Larger companies will continue to invest more in security than smaller businesses. Organisations with 500 or more staff will account for 60 percent of European IT security spending this year.

SEE: Tech budgets 2019: A CXO's guide (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

Separate research from tech analyst Canalys suggests that the cybersecurity market is in transition as customers change their IT buying behaviour, switching traditional hardware and software deployments for services in the public cloud and other subscription offerings. While these new models only make up 18 percent of the market now, Canalys predicts that will grow to 30 percent by next year.

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Image: Canalys

Despite the big numbers, security remains a low priority for many organisations; Canalys calculates that only two percent of IT spending actually goes on cybersecurity.

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