The Cost Of Staying Secure

DESPITE ORGANISATIONS INCREASING THEIR SECURITY BUDGETS AND INVESTING SIGNIFICANTLY IN THE LATEST CYBERSECURITY TOOLS, ENTERPRISES ARE STILL FACING RISKS OF MORE DATA BREACHES THAN EVER BEFORE. SECURITY CORRESPONDENT DANIEL BARDSLEY SPEAKS TO INDUSTRY EXPERTS TO DISCUSS HOW IT AND BUSINESS LEADERS CAN USE THEIR RESOURCES MORE WISELY.

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Spending on cybersecurity is increasing dramatically, with budgets growing much faster than those of the IT sector as a whole.

According to figures from Gartner reported by Cybersecurity Ventures, the annual global spend on cybersecurity this year is likely to be $124 billion.

Seen in isolation, this figure appears large enough. But when it is considered that is 35 times the size of the yearly spend from 13 years ago, it appears truly vast.

Statistics from RSA Conference, the annual cybersecurity event in San Francisco, indicate that global cybersecurity budgets rose by 141 percent between 2010 and 2018, with spending on cloud security alone having increased almost 1.5 times since 2017.

And this is at a time when IT as a whole is not benefiting from the same level of growth in spending. In July, Gartner forecast that worldwide IT spending in 2019 would reach $3.74 billion, up just 0.6 percent on last year’s figure.

There is no sign that the stratospheric growth in cybersecurity investments is going to tail off, even if IT budgets as a whole remain under pressure. Far from it, in fact – last year’s total cybersecurity spend was 12.4 percent up on that of 2017, according to Gartner, and by 2022 global cybersecurity investments are forecast to reach $170.4 billion.

The amounts being spent by some individual organisations on cybersecurity are eye-watering. Microsoft’s cybersecurity budget exceeds $1 billion a year, Cybersecurity Ventures reports, while the financial organisation JP Morgan Chase spends around $600 million each year to protect its assets. And that’s even before the cybersecurity budgets of government departments are considered – in the United States, these can reach many, many billions.

Yet, amid all of this rapid growth in cybersecurity spending, the number of breaches that organisations are facing is increasing too.