Covid-19 to cut information security spends, but drive demand for cloud adoption: Gartner

Research firm Gartner has revised its information security and risk management technology spending forecast for 2020. While the worldwide expenditure in the sector will increase, it will be at a lower rate than expected, it said.  

In December, Gartner said that information security spending would grow at 8.7%. However, the Stamford, Connecticut-based firm has revised the number to 2.4% now, indicating that the expenditure would touch $123.8 billion.  

Networking security equipment, including firewall, and intrusion detection and prevention systems will be impacted the most by the cuts, the study said. Consumer spending on security software is also set to decline, it added.

Read: IT spending in India to decline by 8% in 2020 due to Covid-19: Gartner

“Like other segments of IT, we expect security to 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,” Lawrence Pingree, managing vice president at Gartner, said.

The company had recently said that IT spending in India would decline 8% to $83.5 billion in 2020. 

Despite the overall slowdown, the coronavirus pandemic is driving short-term demand in areas such as cloud adoption and remote worker technologies, the report said. 

“There are 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,” Pingree said.

The ongoing shift to a cloud-based delivery model makes the security market somewhat more resilient to a downturn, with the average penetration of 12% of overall security deployments being cloud-based in 2019, the report said. In fact, cloud-based delivery models account for more than 50% of the deployments in markets such as secure email and web gateways, the statement added.