Australia will see a decline in information security and risk management technology and services spending in 2020.
Research from Gartner reveals Australian security spending is anticipated to decline 5.6 percent from $4.3 billion in 2019 to just over $4 billion this year.
Gartner said that while spending on cloud security grew, its small base was not enough to offset declines in other segments. The company also cited the fluctuations of the Australian dollar compared to the US dollar.
In comparison, global security spending is forecast to grow 2.4 percent this year, largely due to cloud and remote worker security investments.
Global spending is forecast to reach US$123.8 billion, up from US$120.9 billion in 2019. Cloud security saw the largest increase of 33 percent, up from US$439 million to US$585 million.
The forecast however is a downgrade from Gartner’s pre-COVID-19 projections of 8.7 percent growth.
Gartner managing vice president Lawrence Pingree said, “Like other segments of IT, we expect security will be negatively impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Overall we expect a pause and a reduction of growth in both security software and services during 2020.”
“However, there are a few factors in favour of some security market segments, such as cloud-based offerings and subscriptions, being propped up by demand or delivery model. Some security spending will not be discretionary and the positive trends cannot be ignored,” he added.
Gartner added the ongoing shift to a cloud-based delivery model makes the security market “somewhat more resilient” to a downturn, with an average penetration of 12 percent of overall security deployments cloud-based in 2019. Cloud-based delivery models have also reached above 50 percent of the deployments in markets such as secure email and web gateways.
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