Gartner: Global IT Security Market to Reach $67.2B in 2013

Mobile security, big data and advanced targeted attacks are the three major trends shaping the security market moving forward, according to Gartner (News - Alert). As more enterprises continue to invest in the technologies they use to improve security efforts, the global IT security market is expected to reach $67.2 billion this year, according to recent research from Gartner. That’s an increase of nearly 7 percent, up from $61.8 billion in 2012. Gartner forecasts the market will grow to more than $86 billion in 2016. 

Since security is one of the leading IT concerns among decision makers, strong continued growth of this market is imminent, according to Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

“The consistent increases in the complexity and volume of targeted attacks, coupled with the necessity of companies to address regulatory or compliance-related issues continue to support healthy security market growth,” Contu said in a statement.

A so-called megatrend is the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) movement, which will have far-reaching implications on the security industry overall, which opens new opportunities for technology service providers (TSPs), Gartner said.

“To support the growing need for security analytics, changes in information security people, technologies, integration methods and processes will be required, including security data warehousing and analytics capabilities, and an emerging role for security data analysts within leading-edge enterprise information security organizations,” said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner.

“Advanced attackers are now capable of maintaining footholds inside an organization once they successfully breach security controls by actively looking for ways to remain persistent on the target organization’s internal network,” the IT research firm said.

They do it either through the use of malware or, even if the malware is detected and removed, through postmalware use of user credentials gathered during the period of time the malware was active, according to Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner.

“Mitigating the threat from ATAs (advanced targeted attacks) requires a defense-in-depth strategy across multiple security controls,” Pingree said. “Enterprises should employ a defense-in-depth, layered approach model. Organizations must continue to set the security bar higher, reaching beyond many of the existing security and compliance mandates in order to either prevent or detect these newly emergent attacks and persistent penetration strategies. This layered approach is typical of many enterprise organizations and is often managed in independent ways to accomplish stated security goals, namely, detect, prevent, respond and eliminate.”

In related news, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Big Data Working Group recently released an expanded top 10 list of security challenges, TMCnet reported.

The report, entitled “Expanded Top Ten Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges,” includes a bigger list of challenges from those outlined and presented at CSA Congress last November. It addresses three newly defined issues: modeling, analysis and implementation.

“Big data remains one of the most talked about technology trends in 2013,” the CSA explained in a blog post. “But lost among all the excitement about the potential of big data are the very real security and privacy challenges that threaten to slow this momentum.”