Worldwide spending on information security and risk management technology and services will continue to grow through 2020, although at a lower rate than previously forecast, according to new figures from Gartner.

The analyst firm says information security spending is expected to grow 2.4% in 2020. This is down from the 8.7% growth Gartner projected in its December 2019 forecast update.

The coronavirus pandemic is driving short-term demand in areas such as cloud adoption, remote worker technologies and cost saving measures, it says.

In Australia, however, security spending is expected to decline, down 5.6% from A$4.3 billion in 2019 to just over $4 billion this year. In New Zealand, a 3.8% decline is forecast, down from NZ$635 million to $611 million in 2020.

In both countries, strong growth is forecast for the cloud security segment, but from a small base and not enough to offset declines in other market segments.

“Like other segments of IT, we expect security will be negatively impacted by the COVID-19 crisis,” says Lawrence Pingree, managing vice president at Gartner.

“Overall we expect a pause and a reduction of growth in both security software and services during 2020," he says.

“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," Pingree says.

"Some security spending will not be discretionary and the positive trends cannot be ignored,” he says.

According to the forecast, 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% of overall security deployments cloud-based in 2019. The research says cloud-based delivery models have reached well above 50% of the deployments in markets, such as secure email and web gateways.

Networking security equipment including firewall equipment and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) will be most severely impacted by spending cuts this year, Gartner says. Consumer spending on security software is also forecast to decline in 2020.

A recent Gartner survey revealed that 74% of CFOs intend to shift some employees to remote work permanently. Perth-based security and risk analyst Richard Addiscott says that security spending will shift towards the protective capabilities that are relevant for remote work.

Table 1 

Worldwide Security Spending by Segment, 2019-2020 (Millions of U.S. Dollars)