Worldwide end-user cyber security spending is predicted to grow by just over 15% year-on-year over the course of 2025, hitting a new high of $212bn (£160.5bn), according to the latest predictions from analysts at Gartner.
A great deal of this increase comes as adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), and generative AI (GenAI) in particular, hits the mainstream, forcing investment in application security, data security, privacy measures and network infrastructure protection, said Gartner.
Since GenAI made its dramatic debut in 2021 and 2022, with the launch of tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT, threat actors have increasingly employed tools using large language models (LLMs) to enhance their social engineering attacks.
Gartner now predicts that by 2027, a couple of years hence, 17% of cyber attacks or data breaches will involve some element of GenAI. However, said senior research principal Shailendra Upadhyay, such novel technologies will not necessarily be the only factors in play.
“The continued heightened threat environment, cloud movement and talent crunch are pushing security to the top of the priorities list and pressing chief information security officers to increase their organisation’s security spend,” said Upadhyay.
“Furthermore, organisations are currently assessing their endpoint protection platform and endpoint detection and response needs and making adjustments to boost their operational resilience and incident response following the CrowdStrike outage,” he said.
Cloud to grow its share of security budgets
Elsewhere, Gartner’s number-crunchers anticipate that cloud security spending, and the overall market share of cloud-native cyber products and services, will continue to grow.
The analysts expect the combined market for cloud access security brokers and cloud workload protection platforms will reach $8.7bn in 2025, up from a projected $6.7bn this year.
And the global skills shortage in the security industry will also play a major role driving investment into the services market, with consulting, professional and managed services all forecast to grow quicker than any other cyber segment.
Breaking it down
Gartner breaks the security market out into three distinct pillars – security software, security services and network security.
Of these, security software will account for the most spend next year, rising by 15.1% to $100.7bn, from $87.5bn in 2024 and $76.6bn in 2023. Security services will rise by 15.6% to $88.1bn in 2025, up from $74.5bn in 2024 and $65.6bn in 2023. Network security will rise by 13.1% to $24.8bn in 2025, up from $21.9bn in 2024 and $20bn in 2023.
Gartner’s clients can access the full forecast here, and the organisation is also encouraging UK and Europe-based security leaders to sign up to attend its Security and Risk Management Summit next month in London.