Gartner: IT security spending on the rise

At Gartner IT Security Summit in Sydney, (23-24 September), analysts will discuss trends in IT security spending and whether Australian organisations are spending enough or too little to protect their businesses and their customers.

According to the research house, growing awareness of the damage caused by recent high-profile data losses, together with a mobile and remote workforce and changes to privacy guidelines, will keep the Australian market for security software buoyant.

Gartner claims security software revenue will total $219.4 million in 2008, a 13.5 percent increase from 2007.

The market is forecast to reach almost $240.4 million in 2012, an annual growth rate of 9.1 percent from 2007 to 2012.

Despite lower growth rates than other countries, Gartner said Australia represents the second largest market for security software in APAC after China.

The fastest growing categories are expected to be URL filtering, security information and event management (SIEM) software and email security products.

Enterprise anti-virus products show the lowest forecast growth.

According to senior research analyst for Gartner, Matthew Cheung, SMBs are increasingly interested in security technology and services and are moving away from stand-alone tools to integrated ‘end-point security suites’.

He also notes an interest in security-as-a-service options in terms of IT spending.

“Security spending is driven by a variety of pressing concerns, the most immediate of which is the continuing need to ‘keep the bad guys out’ through defensive measures, such as next-generation firewalls," said Cheung.

"However, the ‘let the good guys in’ disciplines, such as identity and access management, are where business benefits and return on investment can be more clearly shown.”

Gartner claims short-term barriers to market growth include economic instability, particularly for new software licences.

High levels of merger-and-acquisition activity, such as Symantec’s acquisition of security vendor PC Tools and the entry of large players, such as Microsoft and Google.

“Organisations are looking to optimise their IT infrastructure and trying to minimise the complexity of their product portfolios,” said Cheung.

“In the long run, we expect to see more-converged security products, with increased pricing pressure on vendors.”